Category: British Isles

Tidelands

1/5/2020

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.

The Stone Circle

18/10/2019

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.

A Wolf at the Gate

6/9/2019

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.

The Lions' Torment

7/6/2019

Blanche d’Alpuget: Ventura $32.99

ON BOTH sides of the Narrow Sea that separates continental Europe and Britain, the 1160s are a tumultuous decade for the nobles who rule not only Normandy and England but also an enormous, sprawling region stretching all the way south around the Bay of Biscay to Spain.
Henry II, jointly Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and King of England, is supported on the throne by his siblings Hamelin the Merlin (an illegitimate half-brother) and Viscount William, the youngest of the late Count Geoffrey the Handsome and Matilda’s three sons. On the periphery hovers Thomas Becket, Chancellor of England, skilful financier and fawning sycophant – a man obsessed with Henry, fortune and fame in equal measure.
With so much land under its control, the Norman Plantagenet dynasty is feeling threatened. To the east French king Louis VII (whose ex-wife Eleanor is now married to Henry) is disgruntled by the Normans’ attack on the city of Toulouse; further north the Germans, under the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, are massing troops for a possible invasion; and in the Vatican Christianity is cannibalising itself as rival factions squabble over the legitimacy or otherwise of two opposing Popes.
England, too, is in political turmoil: the Archbishop of Canterbury is dying and the church is riddled with self-serving degenerates positioned beyond the reach of Henry’s secular laws.
From his base on the River Seine at Rouen, Henry reigns over one of the biggest kingdoms his world has ever known.
In a melee of beautiful, entitled men and powerful, rich women, the Plantagenets and their courtiers jostle for position and favour, surrounded by intrigue and espionage, lasciviousness and piety.
One of Australia’s most multi-faceted authors, Blanche d’Alpuget couples the exacting skills of biography and saga with the irreverence of pop-fiction to breathe life into characters who lived almost a millennium ago.

The Forgotten Children

8/2/2019

Isabella Muir: Outset Publishing $29.50

LOSING an unborn child and having her boyfriend propose marriage within the same few days is more emotional upheaval than Emily Carpenter can handle.
Emily’s fresh wave of mourning reopens painful memories of a previous pregnancy and a tiny boy entrusted to the care of nuns 20 years earlier. Back then, as a 16-year-old schoolgirl she had no choice in the matter, the decision made without consultation by her conservative parents.
Now grieving all over again, Emily – an outwardly successful author – flees her home in Brighton, England, and in a single day drives until she runs out of road. There, on the western edge of Britain, in the island of Anglesea, Wales, she settles into a rented cottage in a village where her days are filled with taking long walks with her dog Ralph and teaching reading. It’s an opportunity for a new beginning, albeit temporarily, free from constant reminders of the ways in which her life has stalled.
After a series of stilted chats with a stranger on a clifftop, however, she realises the time has come to stop running and instead address her regrets and frustrations in person.
As Emily begins to pursue the truth about her surrendered son her research uncovers a trail of circumstances she could never have imagined. Not only is he no longer in the Brighton area but it seems children from the facility in which he had been living were among those sent to the far side of the world as part of a decades-long program to relocate unwanted British youngsters to Commonwealth countries including Australia. No records survive, leaving Emily with few options for tracing his whereabouts.
Whether she will now be able, so many years later, to make her peace with those events (and with her own mother’s role in them) is uncertain.

Tomb for an Eagle

1/2/2019

Lexie Conyngham: The Kellas Cat Press $18.61 (paperback) or $1.41 (ebook)

NEARLY a thousand years after his death, Thorfinn Sigurdarson – aka Thorfinn the Mighty, Earl of Orkney – and his wife Ingiborg have been resurrected from their Viking graves.
One of the greatest power-couples of the 11th century is at the centre of historical novelist Lexie Conyngham’s new work of heavily fact-based fiction.
Thorfinn rules over Orkney from his base at Birsay on the north-western tip of the archipelago’s biggest island. It’s a turbulent time for Thorfinn, among the earliest Norse Christians and a man who has completed a personal pilgrimage to Rome; a rival earl, his nephew Rognvald, has been ambushed and slaughtered on Thorfinn’s orders and Rognvald’s surviving loyalists are percolating trouble. The settlement at Birsay – the de facto Orcadian capital – is on alert.
When widowed woolworker Sigrid finds the corpse of a stranger hidden under rocks in a nearby gully a quest to unearth the victim’s identity begins. Where had he come from, and when and why was he killed?
Ketil Gunnarson, formerly of Heithabyr in Denmark and more recently of Norway, has just landed in Orkney claiming to be a trader of carved wooden drinking cups – a rare and precious commodity in a region without trees.
It soon emerges, however, that Ketil – a childhood acquaintance of Sigrid’s – is not a merchant at all but one of Thorfinn’s most trusted assassins, hired for the attack on Rognvald and now back in Orkney many months later on a mission of his own.
Tomb for an Eagle fleshes out accounts of actual people and events recorded in Orkneyinga Saga, a section of the world-famous Icelandic chronicle written on parchment in the late 1300s, Flateyjarbók.
This is the first title in Conyngham’s planned Orkneyinga Murder series. The second book, A Wolf at the Gate, is scheduled for release later in the year.

The Distant Shore

16/11/2018

Suzannah Thirlwall: $4.99 (Kindle edition)

IN ORPHIR, Orkney, it’s 1391.
Slipping away from his widowed mother after church one Sunday, Thorfinn races with his friend Thora ahead of an approaching storm across a treeless, otherwise-deserted moor, desperate to find shelter. Together they huddle in the entryway of a stone burial chamber, terrified of the fury raging outside but equally panic-stricken at the prospect of being haunted forever by the graves’ evil spirits.
The same merciless gale brings good fortune to the band of Orcadians who prowl the churning shoreline praying that fate delivers an undefended shipwreck to plunder. Their target this time is a galley from Venice laden with riches rarely seen in this subsistence settlement on the fringe of civilisation.
Years later, Finn and Thora find themselves together again, this time in the capital, Kirkwall, where the community’s ruler, a Scottish earl, is preparing to lead his people in a celebration whose character is as clearly Norse in origin as the now-teenagers’ names. Joining in the festivities is one of the few survivors of the Venetian vessel’s stranding, the youthful sailor Matteo.
Finn barely remembers his father, a fisherman who early in his son’s childhood failed to return from a routine expedition, presumably drowned at sea.
When a bedraggled stranger shows up in the revellers’ midst, however, Finn knows instantly that he is back. But where has the old man been all this time? Could a carved tablet in his odd-looking skiff hold the answer?
Soon Finn is on the move, setting sail with Matteo and the earl in a quest that will take them across the open Atlantic Ocean all the way to the land that centuries later will become Nova Scotia, Canada.
It’s there that the expeditioners’ ordeal really begins, pitting Finn and his companions not only against fierce native tribes but against themselves.

Wild Fire

28/9/2018

Ann Cleeves: Macmillan $29.99

IN THE lead-up to her new novel’s release, Ann Cleeves had long teased readers that one of the world’s most beloved homicide detectives, Jimmy Perez, may not survive his upcoming Shetland murder case.
A playful Cleeves resurrected that threat to her character’s wellbeing when speaking at the Bendigo Writers Festival last month.
Wild Fire is the story of that fateful investigation.
The final instalment in the second of two quartets of Shetland crime books, it draws to a close a set of four with “elements” as their theme.
The mystery begins in May, three months after Detective Inspector Perez and his on-off lover and police superior Willow Reeves last worked together in Cold Earth.
It takes place largely in fictitious Deltaness, a hamlet in the north-western corner of Shetland’s main island, where the body of young nanny Emma Shearer has been found hanging in an English-incomer family’s shed.
Gossip suggests that Shearer – who cared for the four children of a local doctor and a part-time-publicist – and the newly arrived father, architect Daniel Fleming, were more than merely friends.
In a departure from tradition for Cleeves, part of the action this time extends beyond Shetland’s shores to neighbouring Orkney as Perez researches the Orcadian victim’s teenage years.
As the team begins to track the killer, Fleming finds himself struggling to hold together his relationship with his celebrity knitwear-designer wife Helena – who by coincidence was acquainted many years earlier with Perez’s now-deceased fiancée, Fran.
Unscrambling the evidence trail is complicated in itself but being forced to work side by side with Reeves again adds an entirely new level of difficulty to the situation for Perez, a man once described as “emotionally incontinent” by his former wife.
Will this in fact be the last hurrah for the moody policeman with the tragic past?

I’ll Keep You Safe

2/3/2018

Peter May: Riverrun $32.99

AN ACCUSATION of infidelity will forever more haunt Niamh Macfarlane as the last thing shouted at her late husband Ruairidh (‘Rory’) before he was killed in a car bombing in central Paris. With him in the vehicle at the time was his alleged lover, Russian clothing designer Irina Vetrov.
Niamh had first learned of the affair only a couple of days before Rory’s death, shattering the faith she had always had in the strength of their supposedly rock-solid combined personal and business partnership.
Now she is a widow, returning with his remains from France to the Isle of Lewis and Harris in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides.
It is there, in a tiny hamlet facing the wind-churned, brutal North Sea, that the Macfarlanes had established their own traditional cloth-weaving operation, Ranish Tweed. With their product keenly sought-after in the world of high fashion, Niamh and Rory had crafted for themselves a seemingly idyllic lifestyle based in a stunningly beautiful home on an isolated headland outside the tiny capital, Stornoway.
The one downside for the seemingly happy young couple had always been the barely contained antagonism keeping their two families apart. With Rory gone, Niamh is torn more than ever between her openly warring relatives and in-laws.
Against this backdrop of uncertainty, French detective Sylvie Braque arrives in Lewis and Harris to investigate the explosion for which Irina’s now-missing husband Georgy is being held provisionally responsible.
But is Georgy Vetrov really the only credible suspect? Could tensions either within the closely bonded island community or stemming from a commercial deal turned sour be behind Rory’s death instead?
In partnership with local police officer George Gunn, the Frenchwoman sets to work scrutinising every aspect of the Macfarlanes’ movements leading up to the killing – but despite its modest dimensions, Lewis and Harris is surprisingly adept at maintaining secrets.

The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

12/1/2018

Lars Mytting: Hachette $32.99

IF THERE'S one dominant theme running through Edvard Hirifjell’s life it’s undoubtedly ‘blanks’: the gaping memory blanks that have always pockmarked his early-childhood recollections and now, unexpectedly, the solid timber blanks from which the highest-quality shotgun stocks are carved.
For 20-something years Edvard has known only a quiet, semi-reclusive existence on a potato farm in an agricultural hamlet near Lillehammer in southern Norway. When not tending the crop with his bestefar (grandfather) Sverre he fills his meagre free time with photography and fishing. He has few friends but is not particularly lonely.
Theirs is a typical rural lifestyle in all but one respect: Edvard is an orphan, having lost his parents in an unsolved incident almost 2000km removed from their property at Saksum when he was just a toddler.
When his home circumstances change suddenly Edvard begins a journey of yearning that stretches first to the wind-lashed Shetland Islands and then to the battlefields of northern France.
In treeless Shetland he unearths a clue that tantalises with its potential to explain the mystery of his father and mother’s deaths and at the same time raises the possibility of a family inheritance intertwined with a fabled stand of 16 centuries-old walnut trees warped by World War I combat into a near-priceless resource.
The young man who leaves behind the paddocks and sheds of Saksum to search for crucial pointers in Shetland soon finds himself heading south due, with the remnant woods of Authuille in the Somme as his ultimate destination.
Weaving together the carefully researched details of actual events and locations with an engaging imagined plot, this novel is rich with the history of two world wars and the intimacies of Nordic culture both in Norway itself and across the scattered former Viking settlements of modern-day Scotland’s most remote island group.

Fatal Crossing

15/12/2017

Lone Theils: Echo $29.99

STILL deeply shell-shocked in the wake of interviewing a genocidal Rwandan teacher, journalist Nora Sand decides to distract herself from reality with a couple of minutes of retail therapy. In the sleepy surroundings of a small seaside village it’s impossible to know the ramifications her impulsive decision to buy a battered old leather suitcase will have.
As Danish news magazine Globalt’s UK correspondent, Sand is on assignment with a photographer-friend on the south coast of England when she makes her purchase.
Much later, back home in her inner-city apartment in London, she discovers a bundle of Polaroid photographs secreted behind its frayed lining.
One in particular catches her attention. Its subjects are two teenagers standing in front of a sign that reads ‘Car Deck 2’ – but the language isn’t English; it’s Danish.
When Sand recognises the taller girl as one of two orphans who vanished in the mid 1980s from a cross-channel ferry from Denmark while on an outing with their carers, her professional curiosity and investigative instincts are piqued.
Attempting to piece together the background to Lisbeth and Lulu’s still-unsolved disappearance leads Sand into the law-enforcement world of her highschool classmate Andreas Jansson, a fellow Dane now based temporarily in London while studying anti-terrorism with the British police at New Scotland Yard. Complicating the situation, Sand and Jansson have never resolved an awkward conversation that scarred their once-rock-solid bond years earlier.
When the name of infamous UK serial killer William ‘Bill Hix’ Hickley surfaces in Sand’s research, the importance of retracing the Danish girls’ last known movements takes on renewed urgency.
Could this maniac – a man who kept the tongues of his female victims as trophies – have somehow crossed paths with Lisbeth and Lulu during their travels abroad, or might they instead have fallen victim to an unknown accomplice of Hickley’s, or perhaps a copycat?

The Little Theatre by the Sea

8/12/2017

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Rosanna Ley: Quercus $19.99

NEWLY graduated from design college but with no immediate job prospects, Faye Forrester is both surprised and delighted to receive an invitation to housesit for an old school friend and her Italian husband in Sardinia.
Perhaps a few days of visiting Charolotte and Fabio’s tiny fishing port on the west coast of the island is exactly what Faye needs as a buffer between three years of intense study in London and returning to the real world of working non-stop. The possibility of collaborating on a minor theatre restoration during her break in Deriu is an added lure.
Naturally, Faye assumes, there will be tall, dark and handsome locals whose mission is to charm the visiting Englishwoman; she is determined to brush aside all such advances as nothing more than mere Latin opportunism.
What she does not expect, however, is to meet a boatbuilder who captures her interest. The moody Alessandro Rinaldi may be a co-owner of Deriu’s derelict entertainment centrepiece with his sister, Marisa, but that’s as much as Faye wants to know about this apparently complicated man.
What she really needs is some straightforward rest and relaxation and a professional credit on her as-yet-blank résumé.
The building itself is magnificent, if severely neglected: a once-grand focal point of the village dating from the early 1800s and beloved by residents. Abandoned after the deaths of the Rinaldis’ mother, actress Sofia, and father, businessman Bruno, it is desperately run-down – exactly the type of rejuvenation project any newly qualified interior designer would eagerly embrace.
Back home in England, meanwhile, Faye’s parents, Adrian and Molly, are facing challenges of their own as they struggle to accept that over the decades they have drifted away from each other and now have few interests in common.
Which relationships will founder, and which will go from strength to strength?

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I Am Watching You

24/11/2017

Teresa Driscoll: Thomas & Mercer £4.99

ON PUBLIC transport, it’s generally expected that passengers will keep to themselves: that they will behave discreetly, mind their own business and not interfere in the conversations of those around them.
Sometimes, however, the worst thing a fellow traveller can do is to do nothing at all.
When florist Ella Longfield encounters an unexpected and decidedly discomforting situation on an inter-regional train bound for London, her first instinct is to intervene. Sitting nearby, Ella overhears an approach being made to Cornish schoolgirls Anna and Sarah by two young men, Antony and Karl, who soon reveal that they have just been released from prison and are determined to make the most of their first night of freedom.
As the mother of a teenager of her own, Ella is immediately alarmed. Should she speak directly to the girls, she wonders, or instead bide her time until the train reaches its destination, then try to telephone one of the families back home in Cornwall? Surely these friends from far southwestern Britain cannot be allowed to head off into the city alone with these men?
Having observed them further, however, Ella eventually thinks better of interfering and decides to keep her concerns to herself, simply heading directly to her hotel after the long trip and quickly falling asleep.
When she wakes the following day she is sickened to hear that Anna, the more attractive, seemingly more reserved of the pair, has disappeared.
Is Ella somehow responsible for this? Did her inactivity allow two men with criminal records free reign to prey on these unsuspecting country girls?
Teresa Driscoll’s chilling tale of regret, consequence and deception is told through the eyes of four people with direct involvement in the case: the witness, the missing girl’s father, a private investigator and the remaining friend.

Cold Earth

8/9/2017

Ann Cleeves: Macmillan $29.99

BARELY have the remains of Shetland native Magnus Tait been lowered into their grave when the soil beneath the party of mourners begins to shudder. Heavy winter rain has destabilised the hillside, prompting a sizeable slab of earth to slither across open sheep-grazing pasture and into the slate-grey North Sea, sweeping with it several headstones and a significant swathe of the island’s main highway.
Elderly loner Magnus’s body is not the only one caught up in the landslide, however; as the clean-up begins, in a supposedly vacant farm cottage facing onto the remote cemetery, a second person is found. It soon becomes clear that the victim did not die in the subsidence.
Responsibility for driving the investigation into the unidentified woman’s death falls to homegrown Shetland detective Jimmy Perez.
Perez is himself still grieving the all-too-recent loss of his fiancée, Fran, an artist whose young daughter Cassie is now in his care.
Juggling the needs of a primary-school-aged child with the demands of small-town policing is challenging, not least when leads in a stranger’s apparent murder are frustratingly sparse.
Seeking an unbiased outside perspective, Perez calls in Willow Reeves, a fellow law-enforcer from Scotland’s Western Isles. Chief Inspector Reeves is familiar with the archipelago’s windswept coastline, tight-knit community-centric culture and deep-rooted Scandinavian heritage, having collaborated with Perez on a previous case.
The family living closest to the site, Kevin and Jane Hay and their two teenaged sons, claim not to have known the next-door house was occupied.
Enquiries further afield – including in the capital, Lerwick, awash with oilfield proceeds – also yield disappointingly few clues, despite the suspicion that high-profile solicitor and aging playboy Tom Rogerson is somehow involved.
As Perez and Reeves probe ever-deeper into Shetland’s shadowy underbelly, will their questioning lead to the killer’s quick and safe apprehension or drive an already-desperate assailant to commit further crimes?

The Hidden Hours

21/7/2017

Sara Foster: Simon & Schuster $29.99

A POST-WORKDAY river cruise. A drug-spiked cocktail. A gossip-fuelling altercation between two of the host company’s top executives.
Eleanor Brennan’s first taste of a Parker & Lane corporate Christmas party is one nobody at the book publishing house will ever forget.
Eleanor has been in London for less than a month when what should have been the beginning of a fresh start overseas suddenly sours.
First comes waking up in her uncle and aunt’s house, where she is living temporarily, with a crippling hangover and a gap of several hours in her memory. Then follows the discovery of the Parker & Lane marketing and publicity manager’s distinctive engagement ring loose in her handbag. And finally Eleanor – along with the rest of the roughly 100-strong office team – is informed that the jewellery’s owner, Arabella Lane, has been found submerged in the Thames’ near-freezing, murky shallows – dead, presumed drowned.
Eleanor, like several dozen of her workmates, witnessed Arabella slap her husband, the company’s managing director Nathan, with full force across the face, without explanation, during the previous evening’s festivities.
Nathan, as a consequence, is immediately declared the number one suspect in his glamorous and temperamental wife’s apparent murder.
But the Lane marriage is not the only one to have revealed the most serious of fractures in recent days.
Eleanor’s uncle Ian and his wife Susan, Parker & Lane’s CEO and resident ice queen, are also at loggerheads.
The stress is evident in the behaviour of the couple’s young daughters, Naeve and Savannah, who – like their barely-adult cousin – spend their hours at home evading the snapping, snarling pair.
As the tension snowballs, ghosts from Eleanor’s deeply troubled childhood in rural Australia resurface, triggering an avalanche of anxiety and self-doubt that threatens to immobilise her right when she most needs to be thinking clearly if she is to survive the aftermath of Arabella’s death.

The Duchess

7/7/2017

Penny Junor: William Collins £20.00

PERHAPS no woman in history has felt the world’s condemnation more fiercely than the former Camilla Parker Bowles. Yet, for much of the past half century, few people outside her immediate family and close circle of trusted friends have truly understood Camilla’s circumstances.
Rather, she has been known only by reputation, and an exceptionally unfavourable one at that: she has been cited as the callous mistress who tempted the Prince of Wales into committing adultery – the third party in what an entire generation wanted to believe was Charles’ fairytale romance with Lady Diana Spencer, his impeccably pedigreed, glamorous, innocent bride.
Now, in The Duchess, British journalist and longtime royal biographer Penny Junor delivers a contrasting insight.
Junor has been observing the Duchess of Cornwall since she was simply ‘Mrs PB’, newly married to an ambitious career soldier who even during the couple’s courtship flaunted a succession of simultaneous girlfriends (including Charles’ sister, Princess Anne). Andrew Parker Bowles’ philandering continued openly after their wedding while Camilla, rather than pursuing the prince, directed her energy into raising children Tom and Laura and appearing oblivious to her husband’s infidelities.
The Duchess examines the disintegration of both the Parker Bowles and Wales marriages and details the events that led to Charles and Camilla’s reunion after almost a decade of platonic camaraderie.
It documents Camilla’s long and tortuous transition in the eyes of the public from despised ‘other woman’ to royal confidant, companion and, eventually, spouse.
Junor describes the frustrations and embarrassments endured by Camilla as she was stalked by photographers, inundated with hate-mail and lambasted as a ‘home-wrecker’ by Britain’s tabloid press.
Above all, she presents a warm and convincing portrait of a discreet, laughter-loving, honest, down-to-earth individual who is a calming, caring and confidence-boosting influence on the man who one day will become the Commonwealth’s king.

None but the Dead

19/5/2017

Lin Anderson: Macmillan $19.99

LONG-TIME residents say that ‘incomers’ moving to Sanday, one of the outermost of the scattered Orkney islands off the north-east corner of Scotland, are generally running away from something. Mike Jones is no exception – so when traces of a human skeleton are unearthed from the soon-to-be vegetable garden behind his partially renovated Sanday house, he finds the police attention it generates rather unnerving.
The discovery is the second mysterious happening at the former school building; in its attic Jones has already found 13 ‘magic flowers’ crafted from deceased children’s clothing.
Orkney detective Erling Flett is one of the first professionals called to the scene, followed shortly thereafter by two forensic experts, Dr Rhona MacLeod and her assistant, and a special investigator, Michael McNab, from big-city Glasgow, a full day’s travelling over land and sea to the south. There, the trio have been looking into the death of an elderly man in his own apartment – a death that now seems to have been much more suspicious than they had at first assumed.
MacLeod has an island connection herself, but not to Orkney; rather, her childhood was spent on the Isle of Skye on the opposite side of Scotland.
As work on the two cases escalates, the team begins to see similarities. Could these apparent homicides – hundreds of kilometres apart and separated by at least half a century in time – actually be linked?
Anderson’s fictitious storyline is accompanied by intimate descriptions of the real-life places and events that make Orkney a unique archipelago of Neolithic structures and World War II relics surrounded by the bitter North Sea between Britain and the islands’ former ruler, Norway: a tiny outpost of proud Viking heritage where Norse names are common and islanders consider themselves to be Orcadians first and foremost rather than Scots or Brits.

The Cows

12/5/2017

Dawn O’Porter: Harper Collins $29.99

THIRTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD Camilla Stacey is confident, frank, fulfilled and secure in her choices to not have children, to eschew emotional relationships with men and to speak her mind daily via the immensely successful blog HowItIs.com. In the eyes of her half a million readers Cam is an idol; to her three older sisters, however, she is a sad, lonely figure unable to experience the true sense of accomplishment that only motherhood can generate.
For personal assistant Stella, looking into a mirror is a painful experience, every glance showing all too clearly the face of her identical twin, Alice, who like their mother was killed quickly and cruelly by aggressive cancer. Now Stella has learned she too carries the BRCA gene. Having her ovaries removed is the most sensible precaution yet Stella is not yet ready to abandon her hopes of having a baby – hopes that have just been thrown into further doubt by the unwillingness of her boyfriend to co-operate.
TV producer Tara, on the other hand, already has a child: Annie – the product of a one-night stand six years earlier. Raising a daughter alone is both a challenge and a joy for Tara: an achievement that outshines even her substantial screen credits. Now it seems this is about to unravel thanks to a semi-drunken indiscretion on what she thought was a largely deserted train. For a professional accustomed to disclosing other people’s dirty secrets, it’s mortifying having her own actions examined, debated and publicly mocked.
As the three strangers struggle to keep their lives in London in order, they reflect on not only each other’s decisions but also their own.
The Cows’ author, Dawn O’Porter, is an established TV reporter and print journalist known for her socially confronting documentaries on sexuality and body image – two themes that are repeated throughout this novel.

Orkney Mystery

17/2/2017

Miranda Barnes: FA Thorpe £4.99

INHERITING property on a previously unfamiliar North Sea island has never been part of Englishwoman Emma’s grand life plan.
When great-aunt Freda bequeaths her estate to Emma, the 30-something insurance clerk’s unremarkable day-to-day existence in Newcastle is unexpectedly disrupted.
Rather than holidaying in Greece with her friends, Emma finds herself heading to Orkney, a windblown archipelago off northeast Scotland. After a full day’s drive and a stomach-churning ferry trip, Emma arrives to find the region grey and bleak at the end of a long winter.
Initially she intends to place the house on the market, but the more Emma learns of Freda – and Orkney in general – the more reluctant she is to dispense with her only tangible link to this previously unheard-of relative. How had English-born Freda come to be living in Orkney, and why does her own family know so little about her?
As she delves into the possibilities, Emma’s greatest ally is Gregor, an attractive but seemingly married freelance wildlife photographer and cameraman she met on the crossing who introduces Orkney through a local’s eyes.
With Gregor’s help Emma explores not only Freda’s past but also the Neolithic, Pictish, Norse and Celtic heritage of this one-time Viking stronghold. Together they visit Orkney’s intriguing attractions: the standing stones of Brodgar and Stenness (calculated to be more than twice Stonehenge’s age), the underground settlement of Skara Brae, World War II relics such as the naval muster point Scapa Flow and a chapel built by interned Italians, and the cliffs and islets that lure naturalists in their tens of thousands every year.
As Emma and Gregor research the mystery of Freda’s presence in Orkney, author Miranda Barnes weaves into her fictitious plot a heartwarmingly accurate portrait of the largely agricultural countryside and its scattered villages (including the ‘capital’, Kirkwall, with its 8000 residents).

The Malice of Waves

4/11/2016

Mark Douglas-Home: Penguin $32.99

A 10-YER-OLD boy is missing, a family is grieving and a tiny, isolated community on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean is being torn apart by suspicion and blame.
Five years ago Max Wheeler disappeared while having an overnight camping adventure alone on Priest’s Island, a speck of private land only a few hundred metres from where his father and three sisters slept securely on their yacht. No trace of Max has so far been found and the police investigation has turned cool, if not entirely cold, yet David Wheeler is certain his son was murdered.
In search of an explanation, ‘sea detective’ Cal McGill has set his sights on mapping the likely route of a body left to ride the fierce currents of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. His methods are innovative and extreme: Cal’s research is conducted using the carcass of a pet pig of roughly Max’s size.
On neighbouring Eilean Dubh (Black Island), Bella MacLeod runs the Deep Blue tearoom and plays surrogate mother to her orphaned niece, Catriona. Bella does not believe a local resident killed the boy; she has sympathy for the Wheelers but is exasperated by their insistence on holding an annual memorial service on the anniversary of his supposed death.
At the other end of Britain, Stanley Pryke’s wife, Linda, is also tormented. Her husband has been deceiving her. The couple has moved house once already in attempt to leave Stanley’s unsavoury predilection behind. Now it seems he’s reverted to type.
Are the disparate lives somehow connected – the Wheelers’, Bella’s and the Prykes’? Do they together hold the key to solving the mystery of Max’s fate? Can Cal’s experiments reveal a link between all three?
Douglas-Home interweaves smalltown insecurities, secrets, loyalties and grudges to perfection against the backdrop of a spectacularly rugged part of the world.

Midnight Watch

13/5/2016

David Dyer: Penguin $32.99

A CRYSTAL-CLEAR, moonless night, an iceberg and not one but two ships steaming at full speed into danger: they’re as thrilling a combination of ingredients as any writer could dare to dream up.
The plot to Sydney author, literature teacher and former lawyer and merchant marine Dyer’s first novel is based not on the writer’s imagination, however, but on real life – specifically, the events surrounding the “unsinkable” Titanic’s sinking 104 years ago.
Largely fact augmented by selective fiction, The Midnight Watch revisits the world’s worst maritime disaster from a vastly different viewpoint to that taken in most retellings: that of individuals on a second, little-known cargo ship, Californian, which like Titanic finds itself on the night of April 14 1912 surrounded by ice.
However, unlike its huge English cousin, Californian cuts its engines and settles in to wait for daylight before continuing its voyage towards the US.
By the time morning dawns, Titanic is on the ocean bed and Californian is a ship divided – divided not by the captain’s decision to delay its progress but by his apparent refusal to respond to distress rockets fired from a vessel nearby. The hours, days and weeks that follow are a time of claims and counter-claims, accusations, allegations and acrimony as Californian’s officers and crew turn on each other and on the press amid a flurry of newspaper fascination with every detail of Titanic’s demise.
Told through the eyes of fictitious Boston American reporter John Steadman, this tale of mystery explores everything from maritime practice to personal conscience to US-English antipathy.
Dyer sets a newsroom-style pace that keeps readers engrossed and eager to uncover the next column centimetre of this brand-new take on one of history’s most dramatic stories as Steadman pursues an explanation for an otherwise-exemplary captain’s dismissal of Titanic’s plea for help.

The Ice Twins

8/4/2016

SK Tremayne: Harper Collins £7.99

TWIN girls: snowy-blonde, blue-eyed, six years old and absolutely identical in every way – so much so that not even the most advanced DNA testing can tell them apart.
Then comes tragedy for their parents: a death – but whose? Which sister has died, and why?
When Angus and Sarah Moorcroft lose one of their daughters in a balcony fall, escape from mainstream London to an isolated Scottish outpost seems to offer the fresh start the tattered young family needs.
Out-of-work-architect Angus and journalist Sarah are eager to quit their challenged city existence, praying that a new outlook will help to soothe the agony of their loss. On remote Eilean Torran in a Gaelic-language stronghold surrounding the Isle of Skye, the Moorcrofts set out to restart their life together in an abandoned lighthouse-keeper’s cottage bequeathed to Angus by his grandmother. Settling into an island of their own with rockpools, beaches and scrubland for the trio and their dog Beany to explore seems like the perfect antidote to their still-fresh grief.
A mere change of location can not paper over the cracks that are spreading rapidly through the already-tenuous marriage, however – a relationship soured by adultery, secrecy and deceit that even after their move continues to escalate.
For more than 13 months it has been presumed that Kirstie has lived. Little by little, though, doubts begin to surface separately in the parents’ minds, raising the question of whether the girls’ identities could have been transposed and that Lydia instead is the surviving twin.
Rich in psychological tension and blurred realities and with the depths of plot normally associated with the genre Nordic noir, this novel is suspenseful and gripping, at the same time delivering an insightful portrait of community interactions in the Hebrides. Piercing winds, racing tides, cloying mudflats and shattering storms are the ideal backdrop to this eerie saga.

The Man with the Golden Typewriter

31/12/2015

Fergus Fleming (editor): Bloomsbury Publishing $29.99

TO TENS of millions of fans James Bond is a suave, invincible Hollywood spy with a cultured British accent, an eye for a beautiful woman and an unerring ability to hunt out anyone who threatens the security of the West. Well before the arrival of the big-screen version, however, Bond was born in print.
A new compilation of correspondence both to and by intelligence-operative-turned-writer Ian Fleming traces this evolution from the unveiling of the first of his eventual 14 Bond books through the negotiation of several Bond film deals and concludes shortly after Fleming’s death, aged 56, 12 years later. It reveals the insecurities, frustrations and embarrassment of the author, despite his growing stature as one of the greatest ever espionage novelists, and provides an insight into a man who valued accuracy of detail so intensely that no feedback, no matter how trifling, was brushed aside.
Writing frantically over a few weeks each January-February while on retreat from deep-winter Britain to his Jamaican property, “Goldeneye”, Fleming produced a new Bond best-seller every year; two, in fact, had been completed in his final months and were published posthumously. In addition, he created children’s tale Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang and wrote non-fiction works The Diamond Smugglers and Thrilling Cities.
The “golden typewriter” of anthology editor Fergus Fleming’s title is simultaneously a reference to the extravagant purchase made by his Uncle Ian as reward for having completed his first full manuscript – Casino Royale – in the northern spring of 1952 and a play on the name of one of the later Bond books.
If there is any slight fault in this collection it is that the correspondence is arranged by project rather than chronologically, producing an at-times disjointed and occasionally repetitive read; this, though, is more than offset by the intimacy of the conversations between Fleming and his publishing colleagues, readers, friends and wife Ann.

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— VB 2020

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