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Lockdown

15/5/2020

 
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Peter May: Riverrun $22.99
 
LONDON is in lockdown: nobody is allowed out and almost nobody wishes to be allowed in, with the rare exception of the few contractors for whom a frenzy of emergency construction has created an earning bonanza.
Early on the morning of his last full day on the job, Detective Inspector Jack MacNeil is called to a building site where a sports bag full of human bones has just been found. It’s an unpopular discovery: the building team is on an almost-impossibly tight deadline to compete a new overflow hospital facility and any interruption to the schedule is both politically and financially awkward.
MacNeil’s priority, however, lies with discovering the identity of the victim and then tracking down the killer. But at precisely 7am tomorrow he will clock off from his role with London’s Metropolitan Police for good. Finally, he will have time to spend with his son, who is presently living in isolation with MacNeil’s estranged wife as residents voluntarily cut themselves off from all outside contact in an effort to evade near-certain death.
The strain of bird flu that has infected London is incredibly contagious and is fatal in roughly 80 per cent of cases. The odds for anyone unfortunate enough to contract it are dismal.
Yet MacNeil must continue to go about his work in as professional a way he can manage under a crippling state of martial law.
Eerily accurate in its depiction of a life-threatening 21st-century epidemic, the manuscript of this novel had been sitting completely ignored in bestselling author Peter May’s files for years, having failed to attract the support of any mainstream publisher when it was first completed.
The arrival of the novel coronavirus saw it reborn and green-lit through the production and distribution process in a matter of only weeks, and it has now been translated into several languages, including German and Portuguese.

Tidelands

1/5/2020

 
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Philippa Gregory: Simon & Schuster $19.99
 
BEING female in 1648 is dangerous for even the most reputable of women; being a deserted wife suspected of practising witchcraft in a devoutly puritan community is almost certain to be fatal.
Medieval England is in turmoil, enveloped by a malicious civil war: the hereditary monarch, Charles I, is under house arrest in exile on the Isle of Wight, the Catholic queen consort is with her family across the channel in France and control of the country is in the hands of a renegade parliament backed by the army of Oliver Cromwell, a “middling farmer from Cambridgeshire”.
Alinor Reekie’s household is equally dishevelled. Alinor’s husband is missing, presumed drowned after having disappeared while fishing off the south coast of England months earlier. A herbalist and midwife, Alinor treads a perilously fine line between earning an honest shilling here and there dispensing natural remedies to neighbours and assisting in home births, and finding herself ostracised or worse for allegedly perpetuating ‘the old ways’. As she scrounges together a subsistence for herself and her two children on the edge of a tidal wasteland, Alinor’s days are back-breakingly long and uneventful.
When a stranger appears in the churchyard in the twilight of Midsummer’s Eve, Alinor has two choices: denounce this papist foreigner’s presence to the godly people of Foulmire or take the enormous risk of helping him to reach the apparent safety of the local lord’s manorhouse. It’s the type of potentially life-altering decision no-one can afford take lightly, but for Alinor the correct course of action is clear.
Known around the world for her historical fiction pen-portraits of the English nobility, Philippa Gregory delves for the first time into the lives of everyday Britons with The Fairmile Series, established with Tidelands and soon to include a second instalment in the saga of the desperate Reekies, Dark Tides.

Virusi

17/4/2020

 
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Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $0.99 Kindle e-book
 
GREENLAND is on red alert.
Clinging as it is on the outermost rim of the inhabited world, this enormous but sparsely populated island is just about as far removed from the tropical diseases of central Africa as it’s possible to be.
The arrival home of one infected traveller is all it takes to change that, however. Suddenly, with the identification of a critically ill returnee, a tiny islet off the mainland’s east coast is a potential threat to thousands of scattered Greenlanders stretching from far-flung settlements to the capital, Nuuk.
Aid worker Navana – now known officially as “patient zero” – is presenting with all the classic symptoms of a fast-moving virus. The fact she has only recently left a developing area of South Sudan bordering the Democratic Republic of Congo is particularly troubling to the health department.
Responsibility for ensuring residents of Niisarnaq comply with a hastily ordered lockdown rests with Constable David Maratse, a loner in the Greenlandic police force who finds himself on assignment in the minuscule community at exactly the wrong time.
Only hours earlier Maratse’s sole mission had been keeping the peace between two warring neighbours – a fisherman and a hunter – engaged a long-running local feud.
But with no law-enforcement backup available, insufficient protective clothing on hand and only an inexperienced trainee nurse on duty, corralling Niisarnaq’s population and at the same time stabilising Navana until help can be flown in is a nearly insurmountable challenge.
Petersen’s release of the 17th novella in his Arctic Shorts series is a timely gift to readers weathering the coronavirus pandemic in isolation, desperate to find a few hours of relief through a storyline that develops as quickly as its subject matter and in an exotic setting. Virusi’s skilful mirroring of real-world events makes for a perfect few hours of diversionary escapism.

The Wife and the Widow

10/4/2020

 
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Christian White: Affirm Press $16.99
 
KATE Keddie’s husband John is missing.
Only hours earlier, with their daughter Mia, Kate waited for an excruciatingly long time in the arrivals area of Melbourne International Airport for a man who was not on his nominated flight home from a week-long conference in London that it has now emerged he was never even registered to attend.
Baffled and disillusioned, Kate is searching desperately for clues as to what, exactly, has been unfolding in John’s apparently parallel life for the past few months.
The situation isn’t helped by the fact John’s parents are behaving oddly. His father is bluntly critical of the marriage and his mother is claiming to have had a religious vision that confirms John is not yet dead.
Abby Gilpin’s husband is also absent – not physically, in Ray’s case, but certainly on an emotional level.
Abby is trapped in a numbingly mundane routine of restocking shelves and counting out change at the supermarket on Belport Island, a popular holiday hotspot off the southeastern coast of mainland Australia, accessible by ferry from the Bellarine Peninsula near Geelong. Belport’s off-season population is claustrophobically sparse compared to the hordes of high-season visitors who flood across the water to take up temporary residence in summer.
Ray has barely touched his wife in weeks – or is it months? Abby knows something feels off in their relationship but rather than raise the subject directly with Ray opts to bury herself in her other great passion: taxidermy.
The common denominator between the troubled couples is the island: John Keddie spent time there as a child but has been reluctant as an adult to make the most of the house he and Kate own in a quiet corner of this laid-back community.
Can the superficially blissful Keddies’ and the openly distant Gilpins’ lives somehow be intertwined?

​The Tenth Girl

3/4/2020

 
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Sara Faring: St Martin’s Press $20.72 Kindle e-book
 
TALES of ghostly hauntings are not unheard of in remote boarding schools – but when the facility in question has been abandoned for decades, the first wave of new teachers deployed to its musty classrooms is justifiably skittish.
Perched at the southernmost tip of South America, surrounded by inhospitable mountains and fields of jagged ice and accessible only by water, the ramshackle cluster of buildings is rundown and eerie.
Among those recruited to teach an elite class of 10 handpicked teenage girls is Mavi, the orphaned and destitute daughter of an anti-establishment couple ‘disappeared’ by Argentina’s ruling dictatorship. Mavi’s only ally against disengaged students and disaffected colleagues is Yesi, an aspiring author who spends every non-teaching moment adding to her manuscript.
It’s not long, however, before Mavi also attracts the attention of Domenic, the overly privileged wastrel son of the current principal.
The Vaccaro School was once one of Argentina’s most elite institutions – until its sudden closure ignited speculation that a curse had been cast upon it by the local indigenous Zapuche tribe, condemning it to fail as a business and leading to the outbreak of a fatal virus among its few remaining inhabitants.
Now, against the backdrop of the country’s crippling political turmoil, Carmela De Vaccaro has taken charge, denying outright the existence of all such paranormal phenomena and determined to reclaim her family legacy’s former prestige.
But with inexplicable happenings becoming increasingly evident around her, Mavi quickly starts to suspect there is more than a pinch of truth behind claims that the premises are populated by mysterious beings known as los Otros (the Others).
Told through the eyes of alternate narrators, The Tenth Girl is an up-close chronicle of a chain of psychologically disturbing scenarios unfolding within the confines of an isolated community cut off from the wider world.

Niche Writing

27/3/2020

 
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Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $7.99 Kindle e-book

WRITING being the solitary pursuit that it is, few readers have the chance to truly explore the steps through which their favourite books are born.
Challenging himself to lay bare his literary process does not intimidate Christoffer Petersen, however.
In recent years Petersen – a Brit whose chosen pen name is quintessentially Danish – has produced dozens of novels, novellas and short stories and at the same time established for this stable its own ‘Arctic noir’ niche.
Not only has Petersen created these stories, he has also doubled as the independent publisher of both hardcopy and electronic editions through Aarluuk Press. Most recently he has taken his involvement to the extreme by adding an e-book ordering portal to his website, enabling him to control the all-important sales and distribution.
Now, in a guide intended for “emerging authors, amateur writers and readers”, Petersen explores his chosen pathway in a step-by-step analysis of what has worked, and why, along his journey to becoming self-sufficient.
Characters such as David Maratse, Petra ‘Piitalaat’ Jensen, Fenna Brongaard, Freja Hansen and Jon Østergård are the human face of the battle against crime in Petersen’s Greenland and Denmark, occasionally venturing further afield to pursue a suspect in the US, Canada, the UK or Iceland. His own experiences in and understanding of these locations fuels descriptions with precisely the degree of detail that’s needed to engage the public and generate enticing backdrops to his action sequences.
Petersen’s ‘how to’ sections are grouped into two clear themes: ‘niche’ and ‘writing’ – the who, what, why, where, when and how of finding, defining, developing and populating a niche with original content that will sell, and of then sitting down at a desk to generate this. Presented in manageable, bite-sized chapters, his advice is both practical and motivational, delivering sound guidelines to drive planning and productivity.

The Good Turn

21/2/2020

 
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Dervla McTiernan: HarperCollins $32.99

LIFE for Anna has reached its lowest possible ebb: her daughter Tilly is refusing to communicate, apparently traumatised by some unspeakably scarring ordeal; her drug-addicted brother Niall is incapable of leaving the bed of the flat the siblings share in Dublin; and she is broke to the point of being too poor to afford a proper midday meal for herself and her child.
On the other side of Ireland, Detective Garda Peter Fisher is frantic. A 12-year-old girl has been snatched from a footpath and thrown into the boot of a vehicle in Galway.
Fisher’s mentor, Detective Sergeant Cormac Reilly, is being denied the police resources the pair need to start a search – payback, they assume, for the straight-laced Reilly having fallen foul of the unscrupulous hierarchy at their station during previous incidents. Both men know that time is all-important when attempting to solve an abduction.
With Reilly temporarily diverted to interview the distraught parents, Fisher must decide on his own what to do next. Dusk is falling and a potential suspect’s car has been sighted heading away from the city and towards an isolated wilderness area. Should he try to follow it now, before any more daylight is lost, or wait for Reilly to return his call?
The consequences of the young detective’s choice will have ramifications not only for himself but also for those around him, spinning Fisher out of his comfortable Galway existence and into the village of his early years, Roundstone, where he finds two strangers living in his grandmother Maggie’s house.
Is the scattering of recent events somehow connected?
Dervla McTiernan’s third Cormack Reilly novel (building on the success of The Rúin and The Scholar) promotes Fisher to the front line as a key character for the first time while Reilly takes a sideways step into a parallel investigation.

Mourning in Malmö

17/1/2020

 
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Torquil MacLeod: Torquil MacLeod Books $3.15 (Kindle e-book)

EIGHT hundred and fifty-two people died when the Baltic ferry MS Estonia sank just after 1am on September 28 1994.
It remains the deadliest peacetime shipping disaster ever in European waters and the second-worst involving a European-flagged vessel after RMS Titanic’s loss more than 80 years earlier.
In the midst of a ferocious storm, roughly midway between Tallinn, Estonia, and Stockholm, Sweden, the ferry shuddered violently, then began taking on water and quickly capsized. The wreck was never salvaged and most of the bodies now lie trapped on the sea floor.
Conspiracy theories abound. With the former Eastern Bloc disintegrating, in the early 1990s cross-border smuggling of people, technology and equipment was rife. Is it possible something or someone on Estonia that night could not be allowed to reach land?
Among those on board was Anita Sundström’s father, Jens Ullman. Now a police inspector, Sundström has never fully understood the circumstances surrounding her papa’s death. The surfacing of a tenuous link between Estonia and a pair of baffling attacks in Malmö, southern Sweden, reignites her curiosity.
Markus Jolis has attempted to murder his elderly wife with a kitchen knife and then reported his own crime to the authorities; he has dementia, however, and can’t so much as recall – let alone explain – this bizarre behaviour.
In the same city, businessman Iqbal Nawaz has been found bludgeoned on the periphery of a sports ground, apparently overpowered while jogging. The forensics team reports that the weapon used is wooden and ridged but so far nothing of this type has been found.
Against a backdrop of cross-cultural distrust and entrenched prejudice, Sundström pushes the boundaries of her sometimes-conflicting roles as a senior officer, professional colleague, long-distance girlfriend and doting grandmother. As she juggles her priorities, one misstep could cost Sundström much more than just a figurative rap over the knuckles at work.

A Silent Death

10/1/2020

 
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Peter May: Hachette Australia $19.99

SPAIN'S southeastern-most stretch of beaches is known with good reason as the ‘Costa del Crime’. Between Málaga and the Gibraltar border, resort towns dot the sandy coastline, sheltering tens of thousands of seasonal tourists and more than the occasional expat desperado.
For Cristina Sánchez, this reality is part of everyday policing in Marviña.
Yet, despite the presence of these uninvited gangsters within her community, Sánchez is not expecting that a standard callout will lead to an encounter with one of Europe’s most wanted men. The incident starts as a routine response to a simple break-in, but within minutes of arriving at an upmarket development, Sánchez is embroiled in a fatal shooting.
The victim is not an officer or even a suspect, however; rather, the body crumpled awkwardly on the cold tiled floor of the villa is that of a woman who has been living there – and the person holding the gun is her English partner Ian Templeton. Having mistaken his girlfriend for an intruder, Templeton has killed her in error.
An added complication soon emerges: the shooter, Templeton, does not actually exist. Instead, this attractive, charming foreigner is the alter ego of the UK’s number one fugitive, Jack Cleland, cocaine trafficker extraordinaire and police assassin.
At home in London, Scottish-born investigator John Mackenzie is assigned to the case. The National Crime Agency needs a specialist courier. Mackenzie’s mission is to fly to Spain and return later the same day with Cleland in custody.
For Mackenzie, the timing is dreadful: the aunt who raised him is due to be buried in Glasgow, his estranged wife is working to alienate him from his son and daughter, and nightmares about his late father’s death are robbing him of a solid night’s sleep.
Now, he’s being forced to play in-flight escort to some lowlife drug lord.

White Horses

6/12/2019

 
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Rachael Treasure: HarperCollins $32.99
 
SHARK attack or foul play: these are the two credible explanations for professional surfer Kai Kaahea’s disappearance off Pinrush Point – an event that prompts the international media and fellow surfers alike to join police in besieging this sliver of outback West Australian coastline.
Yet, one local is oblivious to the missing Kai’s apparent fame: drover Drift Wood, the only daughter of itinerant poetry-loving horseman Split and his late wife, who died in the same stretch of water when Drift was a child.
Having returned to the Widgenup district with a fresh mob of cattle for fattening, the Woods find themselves in the right place at the very worst possible time, their customarily quiet camp existence disrupted by a frenzied hunt for the young Hawaiian.
Unaccustomed to being surrounded by a throng of strangers and struggling to manage her father’s unpredictable, frequently drunken behaviour, Drift is relieved to find a friendly presence in the form of Constable Simon Swain. As a member of the investigating team, dependable Simon is a godsend for Drift and a potential lifesaver for Split.
Life has always been tough for Drift. With little spending money, no permanent home and almost no contact with people her own age for company, the 21-year-old is ill at ease socialising and struggles to accept Simon’s interest in her.
However, when Drift crosses paths with Sophia Gaier, the billionaire owner of The Planet, an enormous neighbouring station and conservation area, and Sophia’s community of workers, she finally begins to feel a sense of belonging and purpose.
Rachel Treasure’s innate connection to rural culture, understanding of livestock husbandry and ability to generate relatably flawed characters give this story a genuine warmth and authenticity in which the value of an entertaining, believable journey for the reader outweighs any expectation of a fairytale-happy conclusion.

The Calendar Man | The Twelfth Night

29/11/2019

 
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Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $5.99 each Kindle e-books

DANISH-BASED author Christoffer Petersen’s Christmas offering to fans of Arctic noir is a pair of seasonally themed novellas designed to be enjoyed progressively across the Advent–New Year period.
The action in the first of the two releases, The Calendar Man, begins on December 1 and continues in bite-sized chapters that can be read in less than 15 minutes per day throughout the lead-up to Christmas, culminating on Christmas Eve, when Scandinavians (including Greenlanders) celebrate by sharing meals and opening gifts together. It is the literary equivalent of the 24-part Julekalendere programs broadcast on television every year and the internationally popular windowed wall calendars.
The second picks up the storyline on January 5 and runs for 48 hours to end early on the morning immediately after Twelfth Night, or Mitaartut.
Both feature a cast of central characters introduced in Petersen’s previous series, set in the same location a quarter of a century earlier: police colleagues Petra ‘Piitalaat’ Jensen, Gaba Alatak, Aqqa Danielsen and Atii Napa and politician’s daughter Pipaluk Uutaaq from Greenland Crime, and Iiluuna Mattikalaat, a troubled child from Arctic Short Stories.
Even in 2042 serious crime is rare in Greenland – so rare that when an Advent calendar is found on a mutilated body in the capital, Nuuk, Commissioner Jensen is recalled to duty despite being on extended leave at the time.
First Minister Uutaaq is taking no chances with law and order in her rapidly developing city. A vote on independence from King Frederik’s Denmark is looming and nothing – not even a cryptic and very public corpse – can be allowed to derail the democratic process.
Juxtaposing the elements of a contemporary crime thriller with the warmth of traditional festivities in a remote, otherworldly setting, Petersen serves up a glimpse into a culture as exotic and mysterious to outsiders as it is rich and welcoming.

Bewildered

25/10/2019

 
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Laura Waters: Affirm Press $29.99
 
LOSING her travelling companion on just the second morning of a 3068km hike does not bode well for Laura Waters’ chances of tramping the entire length of New Zealand’s two main islands from north to south.
It’s a catastrophe-in-the-making that under any other circumstances could derail such an ambitious project completely.
Waters, however, simply steels herself, acknowledging silently that somewhere deep within she’s been almost expecting to have this happen. She might not have known precisely how it would unfold but the fact her carefully calculated plan has been upended at the very beginning does not really surprise her.
Despite the disarray, there’s no question as to whether Waters will continue independently. For this Australian travel writer, there’s no going back – not in the short term, at any rate.
Never having done any true long-distance walking, much less camped alone, she’s left a secure job in Melbourne to spend the next several months on Te Araroa: “the long pathway” that links the uppermost tip of Northland, Cape Reinga, with the Bluff, directly below Invercargill. It’s a lightly trodden trail that’s little known outside serious hiking circles, sketchily signposted and almost indistinguishable from the surrounding scrub or forest for much of its length as it traverses soft sandy beaches, heavily trees mountain ranges, dormant volcanoes and the intimidating expanse of Auckland’s spread-out suburbs and industrial estates.
Carrying all her own survival gear and food for up to a week at a time, 40-something Waters is determined that nothing – not the attrition of fellow trampers, not her own physical pain and not dispiriting weather – will break her focus.
Her story is the Australasian version of Wild – an exploration not only of New Zealand’s ruggedly beautiful but tortuous environment but also of one woman’s commitment to honour her promise to herself.

Through Ice & Fire

18/10/2019

 
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Sarah Laverick: Macmillan Australia $34.99

TWO things of note occur in Newcastle, near Sydney, in 1989: the city experiences a magnitude 5.6 earthquake that damages 50,000 buildings and cost $4 billion in repairs, and Australia’s first locally built Antarctic icebreaker, Aurora Australis, is launched.
It isn’t exactly an easy birth. Early in the process engineers at Carrington Slipways discover inconsistencies in plans supplied by renowned Finnish shipyard Wärtsilä Marine: ducts do not join up, services overlap, pipes are forced to compete for the same bulkhead space. With patience and ingenuity the team forges ahead – only to have production derailed again shortly thereafter when Wärtsilä enters bankruptcy.
Despite these hurdles Aurora Australis is completed on time in 1990 and delivered to operator P&O Polar on behalf of the Australian Government.
Fitted with 133 berths, it incorporates an array of laboratories, hull-mounted oceanographic sensors, a central data-logging system, a commercial-sized trawl net, finer sampling nets, a conference facility, a photographic darkroom and a surgery. It is the most sophisticated vessel ever used by the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition.
Its first voyage of significance is to Australia’s three stations on the edge of the continent itself (Casey, Mawson and Davis), combining on the brand-new ship both new personnel and new systems – a recipe for certain frustration if not complete disaster.
This is the start of a 30-year career during which Aurora Australis survives fires, besetment, breakdowns, a grounding, illness and injuries, and the failure of key pieces of scientific monitoring and recording equipment, all while making a priceless contribution to Antarctic research. Presented in biographical style, Through Ice & Fire records the highlights and lowlights of three decades of sailing in one of the world’s harshest environments and pays tribute to the people who populate the ship through until its retirement in Hobart at the end of the 2019–20 summer season.

​The Stone Circle

18/10/2019

 
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 Elly Griffiths: Hachette Australia $19.99
 
FORENSIC archaeologist Dr Ruth Galloway and her cohort were never intended to go on sleuthing beyond case number 10 so the appearance of an 11th novel in the murder-mystery series is a bonus for fans of Elly Griffiths’ books.
Now, in the new instalment of this long-running police drama, Ruth finds herself at the centre of another possible crime when two female skeletons – dated several millennia apart – are exhumed from a Neolithic circle near King’s Lynn, Norfolk. The area is best known as the seat of the British royal family’s country estate, Sandringham, yet death is all too common in this pretty stretch of seaside villages and softly undulating farms.
The first young woman is found to have been buried inside a stone cist in keeping with Bronze Age tradition.
The second set of bones, however, is much more recent, leading Detective Inspector Harry Nelson and his team in King’s Lynn to believe it might be the remains of Margaret Lacey, a local girl who went missing as a 12-year-old on the evening of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer’s wedding in 1981.
Various suspects were interviewed at the time of her disappearance, including Margaret’s father and brother and a highly eccentric neighbourhood loner, yet no trace of the well-liked young student has ever surfaced.
But how could this modern-day corpse, regardless of its origin, have become intertwined with a sacred site laid out thousands of years before the birth of Christ?
Disentangling the details around the twin burials’ discovery will take every trick in Harry’s professional book and every ounce of concentration, not least of all as his wife of 20-odd years is due to give birth any day to a child that might not be his, and Ruth’s daughter Kate – who definitely is his biological daughter – is growing up fast.

​The Body on the Beach

11/10/2019

 
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Anna Johannsen: Thomas & Mercer $19.99
 
SINCE leaving Amrum, a laid-back island community off the north-west corner of mainland Germany, Lena Lorenzen has established an entirely new life for herself as a detective inspector based in Kiel.
Suddenly, an unforeseen return to Amrum looms, at once disrupting Lena’s comfortable big-city routine, providing temporary respite from an increasingly claustrophobic relationship with a colleague, and reuniting her with a former boyfriend, Erck, and her beloved Aunt Beke.
The director of a children’s home has died while relaxing late one evening in a beach chair on Amrum’s famous strip of snowy-white North Sea sand. The signs suggest heart attack as the likely cause, but his widow has requested an autopsy and the possibility of poisoning with a fast-acting and all-but-undetectable substance has been raised.
Lena has never been a favourite at the station in Kiel so the superintendent’s decision to appoint her to this investigation is somewhat baffling. Is she being set up to fail, she wonders.
As her partner Lena is assigned Detective Sergeant Johann Grassmann: a dedicated, passionate and lateral-thinking young man eager to make his mark on the case while earning his senior officer’s respect.
On Amrum the two encounter a confusing web of contradictory statements and unexplained gaps in the timeline. Not even the local police account of the body’s discovery is complete.
The more Lena and Johann compile evidence, the more apparent it becomes that Hein Bohlen was a far more complex character than those around him knew.
Having behaved unpredictably in the days immediately preceding his death, he could well have fallen foul of any number of people. Could someone in his circle have been provoked to kill him?
Originally published in German, The Body on the Beach is the first in a series of English-language Lena Lorenzen novels from Northern Friesland native Johannsen and New Zealand translator Lisa Reinhardt.

​Five Midnights

4/10/2019

 
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Ann Dávila Cardinal: Tor Teen $26.99
 
SO ENTRENCHED is Puerto Ricans’ belief in the mythical Latino bogeyman El Cuco that when first one, then another, teenage boy is murdered, natives of San Juan don’t doubt that this beast is the likely killer.
Lupe Dávila, on the other hand, a ‘Gringa Rican’ from Vermont newly arrived on holiday in the Caribbean, is not nearly so easily convinced. Surely in the 21st century people don’t actually believe that an imaginary monster wielded as a threat over misbehaving children is roaming the city’s streets?
Yet the deaths do seem to be frustrating the best investigative efforts of Lupe’s uncle, police chief Esteban.
When Lupe meets Javier, a longtime friend of the two dead youths, a side of San Juan seen by few foreign tourists begins to reveal itself. In the tattered remnants of the El Rubí neighbourhood with its delectable street food and peeling, colourful façades, in the garbage-strewn alleyways and crumbling warehouses dominated by a rampant drug trade, and in the ultra-glamorous ocean-front condominium of international reggaetón superstar Papi Gringo, Lupe finds the most extreme of contrasts.
Could the common denominator in these two horrific crimes be an informal quintet dubbed by their mothers Los Cangrejos (The Crabs) – five male babies born within a few days of each other under the star sign Cancer and raised almost as brothers? If so, could Javier’s life also be at risk?
Both young men died literally on the eve of turning 18 so, with his own birthday looming, Javier – now clean and sober and working to support community programs run by his parish priest – begins to think back over his years of drug abuse and the meaning behind the lyrics of Papi Gringo’s new hit song, “Retribución”.
This novel is partly autobiographical, reflecting author Dávila Cardinal’s experiences as a fair-skinned North American with Puerto Rican heritage.

​Blackout Ingenue

27/9/2019

 
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Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $24
 
DETECTIVE Freja Hansen’s private life is anything but easy.
Her husband Adam – a former member of Denmark’s riot police – is drug-addicted and banished from the home she shares with their daughter Ayoe and the little girl’s grandfather Esben, and Freja herself is still recovering from a knife wound suffered during what should have been a leisurely cross-country run through the Scottish Highlands. Complicating things further, Adam is now employed by a powerful businessman who years ago tried to prey on Freja.
Professionally, on the other hand, she is very much in control. As a senior officer stationed at Sønderborg in central Denmark, Freja has a challenging and fulfilling position doing meaningful work. At least that much is on track.
When billionaire theatre patron Jeanne Fønss is killed in a bizarre coincidence on the opening night of a play, it appears to be nothing more than a straight-forward case of a frail elderly woman having been in the wrong place at the wrong time. After all, having one’s neck broken when a leading lady plummets into the audience could hardly be suspicious, especially when a stagehand admits to having been with the now-dead actress just before she overbalanced from a gantry 16 metres above the plush velvet seats. This certainly doesn’t require a detective of Freja’s ability.
Why she has been assigned this new investigation is therefore baffling. Is her boss – apparently under the misapprehension that Freja is yet to recover emotionally from her stabbing – determined to exclude her from real policing?
Yet, despite the situation’s apparent simplicity, as Freja and Sergeant Mik Kristensen compare statements, something doesn’t seem right. So consistent are the accounts that surely the confession must have been rehearsed – but why?
Blackout Ingenue is the first full-length novel in a new series introduced by the short story The Fell Runner.

​The Burnt Country

20/9/2019

 
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Joy Rhodes: Bantam Australia $32.99
 
LIFE should, by any measure, be returning to normal on Amiens, the vast finewool-producing property owned by Kate Dowd near Longhope in northern New South Wales.
Post-World War II peace has reigned for the past two years, rainfall has been generous across the region and Kate’s Merino flock is in the peak of health.
With temperatures rising, the 1947–48 summer is shaping up to be a productive one, with lush pasture blanketing the district and plenty of water in the Amiens dam.
‘Normal’ is an unfamiliar concept to Kate, however. As a mid-20-year-old woman trying to run a woolgrowing enterprise singlehandedly, she is an anomaly: an unconventional – indecent, even – upstart bucking the rules of societal decency by stepping out of the kitchen and into the world of not-so-secret men’s farming business.
The squattocracy of Longhope is appalled – not least of all because even Kate’s own husband seems to have tired of her antics. Now entrenched in the islands off New Guinea, Jack Dowd has walked out on his young wife, apparently, leaving her alone to face the shame of having failed at marriage.
Compounding Kate’s anguish, Luca Canali has returned to Longhope. An Italian ex-soldier who as a prisoner of war worked on Amiens three years earlier, Luca is a permanent reminder of a future she can never have: a future with a man she loves and who respects and cares for Kate in return, a kind and understanding, supportive soulmate who is proud of her efforts to keep her family legacy afloat.
Even within Kate’s household there is turmoil; her part-Aboriginal baby half-sister is in line to be snatched away by the authorities.
And now Kate is in the crosshairs of Longhope’s patriarchs yet again for carrying out fuel-reduction burns in her paddocks. What lunacy will this foolish woman come up with next?

Valley of Death

13/9/2019

 
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Scott Mariani: Avon $19.99
 
HIS ex-fiancée’s new husband has been snatched off a footpath while walking to dinner in an upmarket part of Delhi and Ben Hope is now the wife’s strongest – perhaps only – chance of having Amal recovered alive. Will this crisis response and former military commando step up to help?
That’s the question faced one otherwise-quiet weekday evening by Ben as he starts to unwind after a typical day at his tactical training base in France.
Ben has just finished putting a group of clients through a routine hostage-extraction exercise when an unexpected visitor delivers the shocking news of Amal’s kidnapping and Brooke’s subsequent distress.
In fact, the capture of part-time playwright Amal is the second blow to have struck the billionaire Ray family in less than a month; three weeks earlier his younger brother Kabir disappeared, presumed dead, when an archaeology expedition he was leading was ambushed by bandits in the arid Haryana region of northern India. Kabir and two graduate students were in an area scattered with remnants of one of the world’s great ancient cultures, the Indus Valley Civilisation, apparently carrying out field research.
Upon hearing of the attack, London residents Amal and Brooke flew immediately to Delhi to be with Amal’s elderly parents and a third brother, Samarth.
Now, with their second son also missing, the remaining Rays will go to any lengths – no expense spared – to ascertain the pair’s whereabouts.
Seeing Brooke again in such an unlikely setting is a complication Ben has not anticipated. In order to undertake this life-threatening investigation on twin fronts, is he able to set aside his unresolved feelings for the woman he was once within a few hours of marrying?
Ben must come to terms fast not only with his own emotions but with both the seedy slums of Delhi and the largely lawless neighbouring desert mountains.

A Wolf at the Gate

6/9/2019

 
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Lexie Conyngham: The Kellas Cat Press $5.44 Kindle e-book

BARELY have Ketil Gunnarson and the coastal raiding party he’s helping to lead landed on English soil when a stranger appears at their riverside camp with a message from the remote Norse settlement Orkney. Earl Thorfinn, no less, is requesting Ketil’s immediate return to the islands.
Struggling to cling to power in the midst of would-be usurpers’ relentless attacks against him, Thorfinn has welcomed the appearance of an influential religious delegation from Colonia in Saxony – a northwestern region of continental Europe that nearly a thousand years later will be part of Germany.
Ketil’s arrival back at the earl’s stronghold in Birsay a few days later is ill-timed, however.
With his Icelandic offsider, Lambi, he has scarcely had time to resume feasting in the familiar hall of Thorfinn and his wife Ingibjorg when a death is reported. A neighbour of Ketil’s childhood friend Sigrid has been found dead – and the presence of an axe protruding from his skill suggests it wasn’t accidental.
Suspicion is cast in a multitude of directions, not least of all at Lambi: a foreigner with an unknown past who has been accused of stealing a valuable drinking cup from a fellow Norseman.
Further complicating an already-uncomfortable situation, one of the Saxon visitors is an acquaintance Ketil had been hoping to avoid seeing again.
In the second instalment of her Orkneyinga Murders series, Scottish author Lexie Conyngham overlays a cast of complex characters on the real-life backdrop of 11th-century Orkney as described in detail in one of Iceland’s best known Old Norse sagas.
Both Thorfinn and Ingibjorg are documented historical figures, first introduced to Conyngham’s readers in Tomb for an Eagle, and the tumbledown-stone remains of their quarters and wider community at Birsay can still be visited, injecting an added dash of factual fascination to this fast-moving mystery.

​Undara

30/8/2019

 
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Annie Seaton: Mira $29.99
 
AFTER an agonising year of physical suffering and loss on the personal front, trawling a network of North Queensland lava tubes for unknown insect species is exactly the professional distraction Dr Emlyn Rees needs.
In fact, the chance to focus on this brand-new research is perhaps the one positive aspect of entomologist Emlyn’s life.
Heading a project team from a university in Brisbane she arrives at Hidden Valley – about five hours’ drive north-west of Townsville – on New Year’s Eve, intent on losing herself in the workload demanded by this pioneering underground survey.
The accommodation that’s been provided grudgingly by beef producer Travis Carlyle and his socially awkward brother Gavin is filthy, the heat and humidity in the build-up to the onset of the wet is sapping and Emlyn’s colleagues are several days’ drive away, still making their way north by road. It’s a lonely introduction to Hidden Valley but, in her debilitated, distressed state, the solitude suits Emlyn perfectly.
Little by little, however, as the wary standoffishness between Emlyn and Travis begins to ease, the two find common ground in their attraction to the spectacular tunnel system that underlies a good portion of the property. Progressing from fragile truce to respectful alliance and, in time, genuinely caring friendship, the connection grows stronger with every encounter.
And, with the appearance of Emlyn’s co-workers and the beginning of their inch by inch-by-inch subterranean treasure-hunt, the prospect of finding something truly momentous mounts. The outcome of their labours, it seems, might well have the power to influence more than one person’s future.
The second novel by Seaton, who with her husband now spends winters scouring Australia for potential story locations, Undara takes its name from the real-life Undara Volcanic National Park, to which the lure of exploring the remnants of a long-ago eruption draws thousands of visitors every year.

The Long Call

23/8/2019

 
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Ann Cleeves: Macmillan $17.99

BODIES being found on beaches and girls disappearing from community arts centres are not typically part of the idyllic lifestyle that lures sea-changers to the North Devon coastline where the rivers Taw and Torridge meet.
For Matthew Venn, however, proximity to murder and abduction is the unavoidable downside of being a detective.
Freshly returned from honeymooning with his new husband, Jonathan, Venn is one of the first investigators called in when a corpse is discovered only a few hundred metres from the couple’s cottage.
It’s a horrible escalation of an already-difficult day for Venn, who has had to stand alone outside the chapel of the local crematorium during his estranged father’s funeral service.
Now, when he should be starting to unwind over dinner, he has an unexplained stabbing almost literally on his doorstep.
Although the victim is identified quickly, neither of the man’s former housemates is able to provide any worthwhile clues as to why he might have been targeted. He is remembered as a rather reclusive introvert who shared little with those around him aside from a restaurant-quality home-cooked meal every Friday.
And for Venn, the complications don’t end there. When a developmentally challenged young woman vanishes after spending an afternoon at the cultural facility that Jonathan manages, the conscientious police officer wonders whether he should recuse himself for the sake of propriety from handling the enquiry. Is he at risk of becoming dangerously close to this case?
With one person dead and another missing, Venn and his small team in the pretty village of Barnstaple are being stretched almost to the point of snapping.
The Long Call is the debut novel in Ann Cleeves’ new British crime-fighting series, introduced when she chose to step away from Shetland as a setting after the release of her eight – and, for now, final – Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez book.

​A Nearly Normal Family

16/8/2019

 
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MT Edvardsson: Macmillan $29.99
 
“STELLA Sandell is under reasonable suspicion for murder.”
They’re the words no parent contemplates ever having to hear: that courtroom proclamation by a stranger that a beloved child is facing one of the most serious charges imaginable.
For pastor Adam and criminal lawyer Ulrika, life in the southern Swedish university city of Lund has always been comfortingly unremarkable. White-collar professionals with an upper-class income and an easy-going, stable suburban lifestyle, the Sandells holiday abroad in winter, dine out regularly at their local Italian restaurant and enjoy cycling together along Lund’s cobble-stoned streets.
Stella has just completed her final year of high school, an occasionally tempestuous teenager employed part-time as a sales assistant at H&M as she saves for a long-awaited gap year in Asia.
Suddenly, though, over the course of only a few days the family’s world begins to unravel.
It starts with a missed work shift here, an early-hours arrival home from an evening out with her best friend there. Then Stella lists her brand-new pink Vespa scooter – an 18th-birthday gift from her mother and father – for sale online. This is a side of their daughter Adam and Ulrika don’t recognise.
But worse is to come. A phonecall late one Saturday night informs the couple that their little girl is being held in police custody, accused of having stabbed a prominent local businessman – the son of a well-known law professor, no less.
Surely Stella is no killer? Adam and Ulrika can’t conceive of a future with her in prison.
Yet unanswered questions begin to pile up, not least of all surrounding the fate of a piece of potential evidence: an apparently blood-spattered favourite shirt.
It’s a moral dilemma for the normally upstanding Sandells: exactly how far will the average person go, and what will they overlook, to defend someone they love?

​Beyond the Shadow of Night

16/8/2019

 
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​Ray Kingfisher: Amazon Publishing $27.99
 
BORN within days of each other in 1923, Mykhail Petrenko and Asher Kogan grow up as the best of mates, brothers by choice if not by blood.
Living in adjacent farmhouses near Dyovsta, Ukraine, their families labour together under the constant scrutiny of the Soviet authorities, producing crops to keep Russia’s masses fed.
Despite occasional famine and a lack of modern equipment it’s an idyllic childhood for two boys who like nothing more than spending afternoons sitting on a riverbank fishing for dinner.
As the 1930s wear on and antagonism towards Jews festers, however, Asher’s parents decide to sell their land and join relatives living in Poland. There, in Warsaw – a sophisticated, cosmopolitan metropolis with motorcars, apartments, factories and cafés – Asher discovers a lifestyle unimaginable to rural Ukrainians like Mikhail. With his father and older sisters earning wages, there’s money for clothing, toys and groceries – sometimes, even cakes.
Suddenly, though, several years’ worth of rumours become fact as Nazi forces swarm across the country’s western border and quickly overrun the ill-equipped Polish defence. Seeing aeroplanes for the first time, Asher finds himself directly in the path of repeated aerial bombing.
Mercifully, it’s short-lived. The initial attack over, the Kogans are allowed to settle back into their regular routine. Perhaps the Germans won’t prove to be nearly the ogres the Poles have feared.
Little do they know that within a matter of months every Jewish resident of Warsaw will be herded into a newly-walled ghetto in the centre of the city and Mykhail will be conscripted into the Red Army.
Fast-forward more than half a century and in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one half of the inseparable childhood friendship had been shot dead, one elderly man murdered at his own kitchen table by the other. What could possibly have transpired in the intervening decades to have prompted this?

​Twelve Unending Summers

2/8/2019

 
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Cholet Kelly Josué: Authority Publishing US$15.99

IN AN engrossing memoir Cholet Josué describes being born in the Bahamas to immigrant workers from Haiti. There he spends his first four years suspended between competing cultures, cocooned by the archipelago’s expatriate Haitian community and unaware that he’s resented by the English-speaking native population.
When an almost-fatal incident prompts his parents to return with their offspring to Haiti, Josué meets his extended family for the first time: aunts, uncles and cousins who together assume responsibility for helping to raise the five Josué siblings. His summers are spent in the country; for the remainder of the year Josué lives with his mother and brothers in Saint-Louis-du-Nord while his father works their farmland.
His priorities are simple: playing soccer (often with a large unripe orange rather than an expensive and puncture-prone plastic ball), studying, telling stories by lamplight and feasting on simple, robust Haitian cuisine prepared in kitchens whose doors are always open to neighbours.
The death of his father, followed by his widowed mother’s move back to the Bahamas as she struggles to support her children, leaves Josué a virtual orphan at the age of eight but living happily in a huge household of warm, welcoming maternal relatives.
His life takes another unpredictable turn when as a 16-year-old he is given directions for embarking on a small fishing boat to be smuggled via a stomach-churning ocean voyage to Miami, North America’s human melting pot.
Finally reunited with his mother, who has made her own way to the US, Josué focuses his body and mind on using his athletic skills to secure a college scholarship. It is only when he is accepted, however, that the implications of his status as an undocumented illegal arrival truly hit, forcing this determined young man to re-evaluate his identity in his adopted country as he strives to establish a legitimate future for himself.

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