Category: Fiction - Wabonga Press

Crossings

5/7/2019

Alex Landragin: Picador Australia $32.99

HOW many Earthly lifetimes can a single human soul endure?
In its initial chapter readers meet one of the two hosts of Crossings as an aged version of the debauched and desperate 19th-century Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire.
Encased in a body riddled with syphilis, penniless and itinerant, the essence of Baudelaire has every reason to embrace the notion of transmigrating from this broken carapace to re-emerge with a new physical identity, ready to embark on a reinvigorated existence but with its amassed memories intact. Baudelaire’s is not the only figure to be inhabited over the course of roughly 150 years by this relater of tall tales, however; in fact, it is not even the first.
The unfolding of the novel also reveals a second shape-shifting storyteller, originating as Polynesian islander Alula at the time of isolated Oaeetee’s discovery by seafaring French explorers.
In the course of making its way from the mid Pacific Ocean to the literary heartland of Europe, this latter raconteur travels via idyllic Mauritius, the squalid port city of Marseille in France and a sugarcane plantation in the American Deep South. Changing gender en route, it pursues its former lover, Koahu, around the globe, campaigning desperately for an long-awaited emotional reunion.
Presented in three distinct yet complementary parts, Melbourne author Landragin’s manuscript weaves together disparate periods in history (including the two world wars), locations as diverse as steamy New Orleans, sophisticated Brussels and the French-Spanish border region of the Pyrenees, and a pair of narrators.
Perhaps most remarkably, it can be read in a choice of two ways: conventionally, from the first page of the book as it stands published through to the last, or through the eyes of a secondary character, Baroness Beattie Ellingham, following a sequence outlined in the introduction that delivers a unique storyline.

The Shadow Writer

21/6/2019

Eliza Maxwell: Amazon $23.99

WITHIN a split second Gracie Thacker’s entire family ceased to exist, obliterated by a vicious teenaged murderer. Now, even Grace herself – “America’s sad little sweetheart” – has disappeared, leaving in her place an unrecognisable adult alter ego: creative writing graduate Graye Templeton.
As a nine-year-old eyewitness called on to testify in a high-profile trial, Grace was forced into hiding to escape a morbid public fascination with her tragic loss.
More than a decade later she has emerged as an anonymous, unremarkable young woman with no discernible past. Friendless and working as a teaching assistant in New York City, Graye is delighted to strike up an unlikely chance acquaintanceship with Laura West, a stylish, poised literary blogger whose husband David is a bestselling novelist.
When the Wests move to an island in Texas it seems the budding relationship between the two women will wither, but months later fate intervenes when Graye learns that a famous author in the same locality is recruiting. Seeking a professional reference from David she visits the couple and is quickly talked into working for Laura instead.
It’s Graye’s dream appointment: learning the publishing ropes from someone with influence, respect and a sharp eye for the ‘next big thing’ in books.
Sorting through the piles of unsolicited manuscripts delivered to Laura she decides to take the bold step of slipping a story of her own into the mix – and then waiting to hear her employer’s opinion of it. For Graye the pressure is almost unbearable. After all, her career prospects hinge solely on Laura’s reaction to the words on those pages, crafted on an old-fashioned manual typewriter and polished over and over through multiple drafts.
At the same time Graye is reacting to news of the killer’s release from jail. What will this mean for the future she has planned?

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.

Devil's Fjord

31/5/2019

Davie Hewson: Severn House £20.99

WHEN a novel opens with the words “He was on the roof of their little cottage mowing the thick and umber turf” it’s safe to assume the story’s not set in London, New York or Tokyo.
Lawn-clad houses are commonplace in the Faroe Islands, however, adding a special dash of other-worldliness to the work of a crime writer seeking an exotic backdrop for an equally unpredictable plot.
In fictitious Djevulsfjord on the real-life island of Vágar, the community’s tightly intertwined fishing families subsist on ever-dwindling ocean harvests. Summer is almost at an end by the time Djevulsfjord makes its first substantial catch of the season: a pod of “blackfish”, or pilot whales.
As locals band together to divide up the result of the traditional grind, Benjamin and Jónas Mikkelsen skulk on the periphery, Benji towed along in the wake of his trouble-making younger brother.
District sheriff Tristan Haraldsen and his wife Elsebeth are foreigners on the west coast of Vágar, newly arrived as sea-changers from the relative metropolis of the Faroese capital, Tórshavn. Tristan’s job is to ensure the grind adheres to government regulations – a role that marks him as an outsider employed to observe while the rest of the village participates.
When the inevitable altercation occurs it’s 10-year-old Jónas who in a split-second of fury attacks, slashing Tristan with a whaling knife before fleeing with Benji onto the nearby mountain, Árnafjall.
Almost immediately the treeless moors, razor-edged crags and jagged cliffs seem to devour the pair, leaving no trace to be found by searchers.
The boys’ mother, Alba, waits in anguish. The previous year her own sibling, Kaspar, was killed by a fall from Árnafjall, and two other men either died or disappeared in unexplained circumstances at about the same time.
For such an insignificant hamlet Djevulsfjord is fast amassing an unnervingly long list of casualties.

The Place on Dalhousie

24/5/2019

Melina Marchetta: Viking $32.99

ROSIE Gennaro and Jimmy Hailler first cross paths under the most unexpected of circumstances.
Sydneysider Rosie is in Central Queensland escaping the misery of her father’s sudden death and the realisation that his widow, her despised stepmother, is refusing to relinquish control of a house renovated years earlier by Rosie’s parents.
Jimmy is also serving a period in exile, unable to leave the Sunshine State to return to his own home in Sydney until a good-behaviour bond has been completed.
When pitching in to help a town besieged by flooding brings the pair together for a fortnight, they find comfort in each other.
Two years later, having rediscovered a mobile phone misplaced after he and Rosie parted, Jimmy retrieves 12 months’ worth of voicemail and is shocked to discover he has a son. Toto is living with Rosie at her old family home in Dalhousie Street, Haberfield – just a hop, skip and jump from the neighbourhood in which some of Jimmy’s closest friends live.
Now working as a FIFO miner Jimmy can afford to fly from Brisbane to Sydney to visit Toto and Rosie – but will he be welcome? Afraid of following his parents’ poor example and disappointing his child, he hesitates.
Rosie is struggling. Reliant on welfare payments to support herself and Toto she is confined to the upper level of her childhood residence.
The rooms downstairs are the domain of 40-something Martha, still grieving the loss of her mother and then her husband in too short a time-span. Attractive and lonely, Martha has caught the attention of former rugby league star Ewan Healy, however, a man with an equally complicated life.
The latest release from the queen of multi-generational, multicultural family fiction (most notably, Looking for Alibrandi), Dalhousie interweaves the perspectives of Australians from various cultural backgrounds in a touching tale of mixed messages and uncertainty.

The Spanish Promise

17/5/2019

Karen Swan: Macmillan $29.99

WITH just over a week to spare before her wedding, London-based wealth counsellor Charlotte Fairfax barely flinches when a major bank seeks her help to resolve an awkward financial predicament in Spain.
A powerful client’s billionaire father, on the brink of losing his life to cancer and now crippled by a stroke at the age of 98, is moving to bequeath the entirety of his generations-old business portfolio to a mid-40s café worker in Madrid – a woman completely unknown to the aristocratic family and its advisors, giving rise to the assumption that she must be the latest in a line of mistresses. Mateo Mendoza is worried; if his papa, Carlos, succeeds in transferring his assets to this stranger, the prestigious Mendoza empire will cease to exist.
Charlotte’s mission is simple: fly in, convince this mysterious interloper to accept a million-euro payoff in return for relinquishing any further claim on Carlos and his estate, and fly out just as quickly, all in time to take pride of place at her rehearsal dinner and attend one final gown fitting over the weekend.
What should be a straightforward negotiation becomes infinitely more challenging, however, when ghosts from Charlotte’s younger days resurface.
The investigation into Carlos’s links to his apparently unwitting beneficiary soon begins to draw Charlotte ever-deeper into the Spanish heartland, leading away from the glamorous capital with its galleries and cocktail parties to Ronda, a spectacularly situated, white-washed village in the Andalusian countryside where the echoes of civil war atrocities still reverberate.
Will doing her professional utmost to preserve the Mendoza inheritance mean sacrificing more than Charlotte is prepared to give up on the personal front? As her supposedly routine assignment becomes more complicated with every passing hour, Charlotte finds herself questioning her own identity and values just as closely as the waitress’s.

The Island

3/5/2019

Ragnar Jónasson: Michael Joseph $32.99

ON AN isolated volcanic plateau in Iceland’s Westman Islands, surrounded by open ocean and populated ordinarily by only seabirds and sheep, four childhood friends reunite.
It’s a bittersweet time for the group, gathered now to honour a fifth member of their teenage-years posse, Katla, killed at the age of 20 exactly a decade earlier while spending a quiet weekend at her family’s wilderness cabin.
Katla’s younger brother Dagur is finally taking steps to overcome the horrendous event and the cascade of misery it triggered. The siblings’ father, accused of having murdered Katla, committed suicide while in custody and their mother, distraught, slipped further and further into malaise until Dagur had no choice but to admit her to a care home, where she continues to languish.
Now living alone, Dagur welcomes the chance to spend a few days away with Benedikt, Klara and Alexandra – three people with whom he grew up in a small satellite town on the fringe of Reykjavík.
It’s been 10 years since Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir lost her own daughter, Dimma, and eight years since her husband, Jón, died. Hulda’s career has stalled, leaving her trapped in a too-small flat barely paid for by a meagre mid-level police salary, and her prospects of gaining a much-needed promotion are all but non-existent.
Tragedy for the reminiscing foursome brings an unexpected change of fortune for Hulda, however, when a body is found below an intimidatingly sheer cliff near their holiday cottage.
As the senior officer on duty when the incident is logged she has first call on the case. Could this be an opportunity for Hulda to demonstrate her true ability at last?
This is the second book in Ragnar Jónasson’s Hidden Iceland trilogy: a prequel set a quarter of a century before The Darkness. The final instalment is scheduled for release next year.

The Mother-in-Law

22/2/2019

Sally Hepworth: Macmillan Australia $29.99

IT'S one thing, in a fit of long-simmering, spur-of-the-moment frustration, to wish one’s mother-in-law dead; it’s quite another to learn that it’s actually happened.
When Lucy first embarked on a relationship with workmate and now-husband Oliver Goodwin in suburban Melbourne a decade earlier she had dreams of forging a wonderfully close and warm connection with his mother. After all, Lucy had long been without a maternal influence of her own, having lived from the age of 13 with her widowed father.
What eventuated, however, was something more akin to a barely functional stand-off between the pair: a brittle tolerance of one another cobbled together by their mutual love of Ollie and, as time wore on, the young couple’s three children. While the rest of Ollie’s family welcomed Lucy into its midst immediately, Diana was coolly detached, showing none of the generosity and graciousness for which she was renowned throughout the community.
But now Diana Goodwin has been found dead – and despite initial suggestions that she may have been terminally ill, police detectives are investigating the incident as a case of homicide.
Who might have had reason to kill this wealthy matriarch: an apparently kind, caring grandmother whose life had been devoted to supporting newly arrived refugees through pregnancy and childbirth in an unfamiliar country?
Recollections of a very public spilling-over of animosity between Lucy and Diana in front of a roomful of witnesses quickly casts suspicion on Lucy – the one person known to have had a likely motive for her murder.
Told from the perspectives of three equally strong-minded, independent women – Lucy, Diana and Ollie’s sister Nellie – The Mother-in-Law explores the complex web of interplay that exists between disparate individuals and generations forced together by the one thing they have in common: Lucy’s husband, Diana’s son and Nellie’s brother.

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 Colours of all the Cattle

25/1/2019

Alexander McCall Smith: Hachette Australia $29.99

FEW authors tell a modern-day fairytale with more astute moral insight, keenly biting wit and generous laugh-out-loud humour than Alexander McCall Smith.
Deftly weaving together life lessons in ethical behaviour with an exotic location and a cast of endearing characters, McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series continues to reward readers with its family-friendly exploration of moral dilemmas in a 21st-century African setting.
In the 19th Ladies’ Detective Agency novel, Mma Precious Ramotswe is challenged anew, not only in a professional sense but also on a personal level.
While busy delving into the hit-and-run crippling of one of Botswana’s most respected citizens and a long-time friend of her now-late father, Mma Ramotswe must weigh up her commitment to her husband and children in the face of an unexpected opportunity to publicly oppose the planned construction a “disrespectful” hotel bordering the local cemetery.
Should she stand for political office in order to have a meaningful say in the decision-making process? If so, how will she fare in a public popularity vote against the arch-nemesis of her business partner, Mma Grace Makutsi: the contemptible but glamorous Violet Sephoto? After all, what can Mma Ramotswe say about herself other than the simple truth: “I can’t promise anything – but I shall do my best”?
At the same time Mma Ramotswe’s offsider, part-time trainee detective Charlie, is wrestling with internal questions of his own. His girlfriend Queenie-Queenie is yet to introduce Charlie to her family, and a boyhood acquaintance appears to know more than he’s admitting about the accident that injured Doctor Marang.
Impoverished and sharing a tiny bedroom with two of his younger cousins, Charlie might finally have a chance to prove his true value as an investigator – and in so doing mark himself out as a worthy suitor for Habarone’s most beautiful shop assistant.

Liv

18/1/2019

Mikaela Bley: Scribe $32.99

FOR Swedish TV journalist Ellen Tamm, a few days at her family’s estate on a relatively isolated island about an hour’s drive outside Stockholm is supposed to form part of an emotional rehabilitation plan.
Crime reporter Tamm is still reeling from the after-effects of her entanglement in the disappearance and death of a young girl, Lycke (the subject and title of author Mikaela Bley’s debut novel), in the city earlier in the year and that case’s reawakening of memories of her own twin sister’s drowning when they were children.
For the past several months has been unable to work. In fact, she is barely holding her life together, leaving the rent on her apartment unpaid, eating poorly if at all and closing herself off from her friends and colleagues.
On her way to the island, however, Tamm drives straight into a tiny satellite community in upheaval. A woman’s body has been found in a vehicle that morning and police have an area of the roadway cordoned off.
Should Tamm continue on as scheduled to spend the allocated time being fussed over by her controlling mother, or should she instead give in to her professional instinct and start digging for information on this new victim? She is, after all, the first member of the media to have arrived on the scene, even if her presence there is due to sheer chance.
As details of motorist Liv’s identity are unravelled Tamm discovers a world of anti-social behaviour, unconventional relationships, public deception and personal betrayal that pushes her ever-deeper into the darkness of self-doubt, mistrust and fear. Has she made an error of judgement from which she will never be able to recover this time?
A psychological thriller with deeply disturbing themes at its heart, Liv inhabits the unseemly underbelly of the outwardly picture-perfect existence of middle-class Swedes.

Northern Light

21/12/2018

Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $24.99

CONSTABLE Hákan Sigurdsson is faced with an unpalatable choice: volunteer to join the world’s least-established multinational law enforcement task force, Polarpol, based at sea in the Arctic, or be dismissed from his position with the Icelandic police by none other than his own sister, Reykjavik’s commissioner.
To be fair, it’s not an ideal situation for Jenny Sigurdsdóttir, either. Since his marriage disintegrated her brother has been out of control – angry, disengaged, bitter and, increasingly often, at least half drunk.
For his daughter’s sake, if nothing else, Sigurdsson must refocus. Perhaps this unexpected posting will become his salvation.
At the same time, English IT genius Adrian Seabrook has a secret he’s desperate to spill. Seabrook has decided that a high-profile cybersecurity conference in Reykjavik will provide just the global audience he’s been seeking.
Not everyone is as eager as Seabrook to have the information shared, however.
As the date of his planned public revelation nears, the would-be whistleblower finds himself under attack. Assassination attempts are made; two of his closest aides are killed.
Among those with Seabrook in their sights are Byrne Cantrell and Edie Teal, a couple whose passion for each other is exceeded only by their passion for creating human carnage. Together they are one of the deadliest combinations for hire anywhere on the planet, determined to complete one last assignment before packing away their concealed weapons and settling down to a life of baby-raising bliss. The hit on Seabrook will be their spectacular finale.
Polarpol has barely been commissioned when suddenly Sigurdsson and his new colleagues – one representative each from Canada, Alaska and Russia – are called into action.
Now, Seabrook’s chances of leaving Iceland alive hinge solely on the efficacy of Polarpol’s untested team.
Northern Light is the first book in a series derived from Christoffer Petersen’s Greenland thrillers featuring Sergeant Petra ‘Piitalaat’ Jensen.

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.

The Lost Man

9/11/2018

Jane Harper: Macmillan Australia, $32.99

LIFE is tough in the isolation of Queensland’s Channel Country – particularly for a single farmer trying to make a go of it almost entirely on his own.
As a social outcast Nathan Bright knows the predicament all too well. Nathan has spent the past decade ostracised by his neighbours and former friends for a split-second error of judgement he will never manage to undo, banished from the local pub, the general store and every form of community gathering.
Few people are surprised, then, when they hear one of Liz Bright’s boys has been found dead in a remote, arid paddock, having left the security and supplies of his vehicle to wander out into the sun-baked savannah seemingly by choice.
It does shock listeners, however, that the dehydrated corpse is that not of Nathan but his brother Cameron: two years younger and happily married with two healthy daughters, in charge of the family’s station and seemingly beloved by everyone within a thousand-kilometre radius of tiny Balamara.
Distraught, Cameron’s widow cannot accept that her husband would have willingly done such a reckless thing. He had grown up on the property; he understood perfectly the danger of exposing a human body to the Outback’s searing mid-summer heat.
Now it’s up to Nathan and his teenaged son – visiting for a few days from Brisbane, where Xander lives with his mother after his parents’ agonising divorce – to unravel for the benefit of the survivors the hows and whys of Cameron’s gruesome death.
While this is not an Aaron Falk police thriller, fans of Jane Harper’s writing with a memory for detail (or those who reread The Dry before picking up this third novel) might recognise an unexpected link in this story of regret and atonement to Falk’s Kiewarra, a tiny Wimmera town crippled by a toxic blend of distrust and drought.

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?

A Month of Sundays

3/8/2018

Liz Byrski: Macmillan Australia, $32.99

KNOWING one another as Skype acquaintances with a shared passion for reading is one thing but what if, as four individuals meeting for the first time, they have nothing else in common?
For more than a decade Ros, Judy, Simone and Adele have been members of the same book club, yet to date their contact has been purely online.
Ros, a classical cellist, lives in inner-city Sydney. Judy runs a yarn and knitting supply shop in Mandurah, south of Perth. Simone teaches yoga in Hobart, and Adele has just retired from a corporate management role in Adelaide.
All four are single at a point in their lives when the likelihood of forming a romantic connection is little more than a laughably remote pipedream. Adele and Simone have one adult child each; Ros is widowed and Judy is divorced. Their social contact ranges from ‘limited’ down to ‘all but non-existent’.
Now Adele has proposed converting their one-Sunday-afternoon-a-month literary discussions into a house-sitting holiday in the Blue Mountains spanning several weeks.
On face value it seems to be a light-hearted opportunity for each woman to get to know three relative strangers as potential new friends.
Taking turns to choose books that reveal something about themselves, they will share a beautiful big home with comfortable communal spaces and plenty of quiet corners into which to retreat if they feel like enjoying some solitude.
What they don’t immediately consider, however, is that women of their age are complex, idiosyncratic, sometimes-headstrong individuals with emotional baggage, health complications and a fierce desire to defend their privacy.
Even before their opening meal together has ended, at least one has made up her mind to leave. Surely their adventure must be doomed?
As the Bendigo Writers Festival draws nearer this is the perfect warm-up act for anyone who enjoys trading recommendations with fellow readers.

Red Storm series

27/7/2018

James Rosone and Miranda Watson: Kindle ebooks, Battlefield Ukraine $6.50; Battlefield Korea $6.22; Battlefield Taiwan $6.55; Battlefield Pacific $6.43

AS 2017 draws to a close, Russian President Vladimir Petrov’s patience pays off.
Petrov has been biding his time, stealthily marking off the days, weeks and months until conditions are in perfect alignment for a strategic assault against the political thorn in his side: Ukraine. Now, with his forces primed with the latest in 21st-century weaponry and tactical know-how, Petrov makes his move.
Ukraine’s charismatic nationalist leader is one of the first targets, assassinated in a pre-emptive strike on the man most likely to stand against a Russian invasion.
Ukraine is not left entirely defenceless, however. At the United States’ urging, NATO troops flood in, and so ensues a bitter struggle for control of the entire eastern half of the country.
This is not the only territory being coveted by a neighbour. In Asia, China is eyeing off land directly to its south, including the Korean peninsula, Vietnam, Myanmar and its longstanding annoyance, independent Taiwan.
As the NATO allies stretch their resources across an increasingly broad front on two continents, the communist superpowers unite to unleash a brilliantly formulated covert offensive known as Operation Red Storm.
Against a backdrop of email hacking, electoral tampering, spiralling unemployment, social unrest and economies in collapse, immediately identifiable characters populate these novels: a vodka-swilling macho Russian oligarch; a fractured US administration of self-interested officials and corrupt double agents; a Chinese leadership intent on regaining pride eroded by the dissolution of its once-mighty empire; passionate service men and women on every side of the conflict.
The depth of military detail in these novels is particularly impressive.
The first four books cover events in Ukraine, Korea, Taiwan and the Pacific, focusing primarily on each theatre in turn but delivering sufficient crossover to maintain the overarching storyline in real-time.
The next instalment, Battlefield Russia, will be released in September.

Island of Secrets

23/3/2018

Patricia Wilson: Allen & Unwin, $19.99

ANGELIKA Lambrakis knows only the sketchiest details of her heritage.
Raised as an only child in London, she has no memory of her father and has never met either set of grandparents. Single mother Poppy has rebuffed every attempt by her daughter to revisit the past – a past from which Calliope, as Poppy was then known, chose to escape 40 years earlier.
All Angie can be sure of is that her background is Greek.
Now, with her wedding day looming, she makes up her mind to defy Poppy’s wishes and search for information among the whitewashed villages of southern Crete.
Far from being welcomed, however, Angie immediately runs into a roadblock of unexplained, blatant hostility. Complete strangers flinch at the mention of Poppy’s maiden name, Kondulakis, and those along the way who appear to have some form of connection to the family are unnervingly evasive.
Angie’s confidence is shaken. Will yiayá and papu be pleased to meet their granddaughter at last, or will this elderly couple be every bit as standoffish as their fellow islanders seem to be?
She remains committed, however. Having flown halfway across Europe to find the missing pieces of her personal jigsaw puzzle, Angie is determined to continue probing until she succeeds in reuniting Poppy with her Cretan relatives.
Crete – particularly the area due west of Ierapetra – was the setting for some of the most brutal, bitter fighting of World War II in which Germans, Allies and resistance partisans hunted each other across spectacularly rugged hillsides and plateaux throughout the early 1940s.
Using as her setting Amiras and Viannos, traditional communities overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, author Patricia Wilson retraces the circumstances and consequences of a real-life Nazi atrocity through the eyes of the fictitious Lambrakis and Kondulakis families and their neighbours in a remote, mountainous corner of Europe’s southernmost region.

The Shape of Water

16/3/2018

Guillermo del Toro and Daniel Kraus: Feiwel & Friends, $19.99

IT'S relatively routine for a novel to be licensed as inspiration for the Hollywood big screen, but it’s far less common for the content of an internationally successful film to be delivered concurrently in literary form.
In their most recent collaboration, Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro and his Trollhunters co-author Daniel Krause have teamed up to present del Toro’s Academy Awards ‘Best Picture’, The Shape of Water, as a book.
On the morning of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 2018 presentation ceremony, del Toro and Krause’s new print project was released.
As an alternative to the movie, the pair’s exquisitely balanced prose allows readers the luxury of overlaying their own visuals onto the haunting emotive storyline.
By 1962 standards, central character Elisa Esposito’s life has always been exceedingly mundane. Mute since birth and now orphaned, Elisa works the nightshift as a janitor at a US Government aerospace research centre in Baltimore.
One night, however, she glimpses something her low-level security clearance should never permit her to see – and so begins a connection that grows ever stronger as she is drawn back time and again.
The object of Elisa’s fascination is an amphibious human, captured in the Amazon Basin and transported in absolute secrecy to the centre, where studying the “creature” becomes priority number one for US scientists striving to gain a Cold War advantage.
To Elisa, though, this man is much more than a mere laboratory specimen, and through their own version of sign language the two begin to communicate.
Is there even the slightest chance that this unlikeliest couple can build a future together? Elisa’s one chance at preserving the relationship pits her against the full force of both US and Soviet operatives.
As a bonus, this book includes a scattering of illustrations by artist James Jean.

The House of Unexpected Sisters

9/3/2018

Alexander McCall Smith: Little, Brown $29.99

HAVING an uncommon surname is just one of many things distinguishing the “traditionally built” Mma Precious Ramotswe as a noteworthy Botswanan woman.
Another is running the country’s only all-female investigation outfit, an operation based on the outskirts of the capital, Gaborone: the nationally famous No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.
It is to this agency that Precious’s fellow Batswana turn when a husband is suspected of cheating, a debt is not paid, a loved one vanishes – or, in the latest instance, a sister of a colleague of an associate is dismissed from her role as a sales assistant for allegedly insulting a customer.
The now-unemployed Charity is adamant there was no rudeness, leading Precious and her second-in-command, Mma Grace Makutsi, to suspect the employer might have concocted an excuse for the firing. Is he going to give the position to a mistress, perhaps?
As the two begin their covert sleuthing a longstanding nemesis reappears: Violet Sephoto, Grace’s former classmate at the Botswana Secretarial College. Is this shameless woman with her too-short skirts, her deplorable student record and her focus on attracting male attention somehow behind Charity’s dismissal?
Before that question can be answered a third conundrum arises: an unfamiliar Ramotswe, a nurse, is mentioned in a newspaper report.
Precious has never heard of this apparent relative. Is she a legitimate family member or an imposter passing herself off as a Ramotswe for unscrupulous reasons?
With Grace on the case of the seemingly unjustified layoff, Precious focuses on her own mystery and how it might relate to her beloved father, the now-late cattle baron Obed Ramotswe.
As his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, author Alexander McCall Smith is visiting Australia. He will speak about his latest releases and favourite characters in Melbourne and Warrnambool next week.

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 Red Coast

23/2/2018

Di Morrissey: Macmillan Australia $34.99

IN THE midst of preparations for Broome’s inaugural literary festival, the sudden appearance in town of a neighbour from her high school years in Sydney catches bookshop owner Jacqui Bouchard by surprise. What could Cameron North – a big-city east-coast lawyer – possibly be doing in the Kimberley?
At the same time, Jacqui is counting down to the scheduled arrival of her teenage son Jean-Luc from France, where he lives year-round with her former husband. Jean-Luc’s summers in Broome are an annual highlight for Jacqui, whose own parents are on the opposite side of the continent.
When her path crosses briefly with a visiting cameraman from Perth, Damien Sanderson, Jacqui’s personal life takes an interesting turn. Damien is the first man to have caught Jacqui’s attention since the dissolution of her marriage. Yet, being based in Perth he is not exactly the ideal partner for a businesswoman tethered firmly to the north-west corner of the country’s biggest state.
Distracting lonely Jacqui from her budding relationship with her fly-in fly-out date, Broome learns that a billionaire miner has plans for the region that quickly divide the isolated community into distinct ‘for’ and ‘against’ camps. While Indigenous leaders debate the financial and cultural merit of the proposal to mine a vast inland area and set up a bulk mineral port that has the potential to overshadow the famous Cable Beach, members of Broome’s multicultural population see either opportunity or loss, depending on their individual circumstances.
With disharmony and bitter divisions building, the looming festival is the one point of unity holding the fractured town together.
In The Red Coast Di Morrissey revisits a part of Australia first explored in two earlier novels, Tears of the Moon and Kimberley Sun, reawakening the story of Lily Barton and her highly successful pearl farm and rekindling interest in the extended Barton family.

The Cull

16/2/2018

Tony Park: Macmillan Australia $29.99

RHINOCEROS are dying, being shot under cover of night and having their horns lopped off to feed an illegal trade thousands of kilometres away.
Sonja Kurtz is frustrated. Not only has her work to establish an all-woman anti-poaching patrol ended disastrously in an ambush with the loss of two squadmembers’ lives but now it appears her boyfriend, ex-CIA agent Hudson Brand, has taken advantage of her absence from their home to indulge in a blatant affair.
Scouting for fresh work, Sonja is approached by high-profile British entrepreneur and animal lover Julianne Clyde-Smith, whose business interests are flourishing among the easternmost game reserves of southern Africa.
With seemingly limitless finances at her disposal, Julianne is determined to both rid the region of its illegal wildlife slaughter and expand her resort empire by acquiring any properties that fail to fortify their own operations against lawlessness.
Her plan has Sonja at its heart: a carefully chosen militia of experienced international mercenaries and local operatives will search out and neutralise the cross-border hunters before they have a chance to strike.
The exact composition of the line-up is at Sonja’s discretion: in addition to young former maid Tema Matsebula, a member of her now-disbanded Leopards squad, and tracker Ezekial Lekganyane, Sonja recruits Angolan career soldier Mario Machado, a proven killer with a murky past and an ever-ready trigger finger. The group is directed by Julianne’s head of security, fellow Brit James Paterson.
When events take an unanticipated turn Sonja finds herself on the run, fleeing from one out-of-the-way park to another in a bid to stay one step ahead of both the so-called “authorities” in countries where corruption among officials is well entrenched – South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania – and hired assassins.
The Cull reunites two key characters who first met in An Empty Coast, set in Sonja’s native Namibia.

Clear to the Horizon

9/2/2018

Dave Warner: Fremantle Press $29.99

FOR more than a year the attention of Perth law enforcers and residents alike has been focused on a single strip of bitumen running north–south through the heart of suburban Claremont: Bay View Terrace. From the vicinity of a nightclub there, Autostrada, three women have gone missing on separate occasions – vanished without a trace after reportedly beginning the late-night journey home alone.
As an ex-homicide detective turned private investigator from the north side of the city, former footballer Richard ‘Snowy’ Lane is called on by a mutual acquaintance to assist one of the families in its distress. The official search for their daughter and sister, Caitlin, appears to have stalled; might Lane perhaps discover something useful – no matter how seemingly minor – that the police have missed?
Inserting himself ever deeper into the case, Lane becomes a man obsessed with giving the O’Gradys the closure they crave. The chances of Caitlin being found alive are dimming yet still they cling onto the hope that eventually whatever remains of her might be returned to them.
Fast-forward 20 years and another Perth family is similarly anguished: a young mining heiress has not been heard from since she and her boyfriend refuelled their four-wheel-drive in Port Hedland before supposedly heading further north towards Broome.
When Lane is engaged by the Feisters to look into Ingrid’s whereabouts, a tenuous, almost-inexplicable link with the Claremont case begins to take shape.
Could it possibly be that the real killer of the Autostrada trio is resuming his murderous rampage after two decades of apparent hibernation? Lane has always suspected that the police were too hasty in their wrapping up of the disappearances.
Now back on the trail in the majestic Kimberley, Lane seizes the opportunity to search for the final piece of the Autostrada puzzle and in so doing soothe the O’Gradys’ pain.

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