Category: Fiction

Winter Magic: A Bitter Creek Novella

25/9/2020

Joan Johnston: Joan Mertens Johnston Inc $4.13 Kindle e-book

A BATTERED woman. A fatherless child. A man with features mutilated years earlier by the jaws of a grizzly bear.
It’s an unconventional combination, yet these disparate characters find themselves forced to wait out a blizzard together after cattle rancher Mike Sullivan finds a vehicle broken down on the roadside near Whitefish in north-western Montana. Inside the rusty old pickup truck Mike discovers Joanne Henderson and her daughter Daisy, a sweet-natured, kitten-loving four-year-old.
In the rural high country, with snowdrifts rising ominously Mike’s only option is to open his home to the pair as shelter until the storm has passed and it is safe for them to continue their journey.
But welcoming two strangers into his cabin is an uncomfortable experience for the unmarried former navy SEAL whose near-fatal mauling has left him with the type of hideous scarring that startles children and makes adults flinch. Mike has had little social interaction since suffering his run-in with the bear and is pitifully awkward in the presence of his unintended house guests.
Joanne is exquisitely attractive: small, delicate, dainty and blonde. Pragmatist Mike knows himself to be hulking, shaggy, deformed. Any attraction he might feel towards this bruised and broken young mother is futile.
Yet, as brief as their time under the same roof is destined to be, it is nevertheless a cosy taste of domestic bliss that Mike can’t help but relish. If only his face and his confidence weren’t so terribly disfigured perhaps this could be his reality.
Winter Magic is the fifth release in the ‘King’s Brats’ series of Bitter Creek stories, adding to the Grayhawk family saga explored in Sinful, Shameless, Surrender and Sullivan’s Promise.
For Southern Hemisphere readers celebrating Christmas in July it is a perfectly themed shot of escapism into a world of generosity, acceptance and unlikely love.

One To Watch

18/9/2020

Kate Stayman-London: Hachette Australia $29.99

LOVE comes in all shapes and sizes – or does it? Certainly not in the highly unrealistic world of ‘reality’ TV, where contenders on the top-rating Main Squeeze bear absolutely no resemblance to LA-based fashionista Bea Schumacher and her social media followers.
As 25 single women or men vie on screen for the attention of a potential husband or wife, Bea is frustrated to see that season after season the line-up is all but identical: tall, swimsuit-sculpted, white.
When a series of tequila-fuelled comments catches the eye of the Main Squeeze production team, the studio decides to turn the program on its head by introducing its first ever plus-sized romantic heroine. Can Bea be convinced to step into the role?
It’s horrible timing for the self-employed blogger, who has been in emotional freefall since her one-time best friend and love interest decided to ghost her.
Now, faced with having to choose a possible life partner in front of a national prime-time viewing audience, she is all but paralysed by self-doubt and indecision. Could any one of these so-called suitors truly be attracted to Bea or are they more likely merely going through the motions with a view to boosting their own public profiles?
Is chef Luc, professor Asher, farmer Wyatt or soccer coach Sam really Bea’s ideal match? All four men are physically perfect – and the reflection Bea sees in her mirror is not that of someone whose natural place is standing beside one of these god-like figures. After all, she reasons, there never has been a fat fairytale princess.
Will Bea’s lack of trust in the process derail this opportunity to find love?
Far from being a froth-and-bubbles glimpse into the world of The Bachelorette et al, One To Watch is a thought-provoking conversation starter that questions societal attitudes to weight, femininity and appetite.

Echoes of the Runes

4/9/2020

Christina Courtenay: Hachette Australia $22.99

CURVING possessively around the index finger of Mia Maddox’s right hand, the delicate serpent-head ring is exquisite. As an heirloom inherited from her late grandmother Elin it has special significance for British Museum conservator Mia.
The ring in the display case is equally impressive, if significantly bigger; in fact, the size disparity notwithstanding, it is all but identical. This one, however, is part of an exhibition of Viking-era jewellery in Stockholm, where Swedish-born Mia is spending a few hours before attending Gran’s funeral.
As she stares in astonishment at the thousand-year-old twin bands of gold, Mia is interrupted by a stranger who has also noted the similarity.
Archaeologist Haakon Berger’s head is swirling with questions. Is this Englishwoman wearing an unauthorised replica, or is it an unreported – and therefore stolen – piece of Norse heritage?
Inspired to try to trace the origins of Mia’s ring, the pair decide to embark on an excavation of her family’s land on the shore of Lake Mälaren, an area known for its rich seafarer roots.
The physical signs suggest this could have been the site of a settlement presided over by a chieftain: a man powerful enough to have raided kingdoms far afield in search of precious metals and human slaves.
Unbeknown to the research team, one such local jarl, Haukr Erlendrsson, did indeed set out a-viking from this waterfront stronghold, returning many weeks later with a valuable hostage among his spoils. As the sister of a high-ranking Welshman, Ceridwen – Ceri – was destined to spend winter in the Norse community before being ransomed by her people.
The further Mia and Haakon investigate, the more clues to Haukr and Ceri’s long-ago presence emerge from the soil.
But, as Mia becomes increasingly invested in uncovering the stories of these past generations, her life in London recedes in importance. Could her future lie in rural Sweden instead?

The Governess

28/8/2020

Wendy Holden: Welbeck $39.99

ONE minute Marion Crawford is turning down a marriage proposal from a long-time friend in Edinburgh and preparing to complete her final year of teacher training, the next she is being whisked by train to London as the newly appointed governess to the world’s most famous siblings: the ‘little princesses’ Elizabeth and Margaret Rose.
King George V and his formidable consort Mary occupy the English throne when Crawford is introduced to royal circles as a favour to her college principal in the summer of 1932. Recommended to ‘Bertie’ and Elizabeth, the Duke and Duchess of York, by relatives in Scotland, she agrees to work an initial four weeks’ trial as the sole tutor of six-year-old ‘Lilibet’ and toddler ‘Bud’.
One month becomes several, then those several transition into 1933. As the Yorks move between their weekday residence within walking distance of Buckingham Palace and their country home in Windsor, ‘Crawfie’ travels with them. Hers is far from the glamorous fairytale existence observers on the outside assume it to be, however, as she struggles to add a degree of normalcy to the girls’ cosseted lives.
An overflowing schedule of competing activities means classes are often abandoned without notice, leaving Crawford frustrated that educating the princesses seems to be the least of the family’s priorities. At this point Lilibet is, after all, merely the daughter of a second son and the niece of the dashing playboy who will be the British Empire’s next king; Margaret ranks even lower in intellectual importance. Deportment and grooming are essential attributes; an ability to read, write and reason is irrelevant.
A work of fiction with historical figures and events at its core, The Governess imagines Crawford’s 16-year career within the royal household in an era of political and social upheaval set against a backdrop of abdication, blanket bombing, betrayal and romance.

Darkness Falls

3/7/2020

David Mark: Amazon £2.99 Kindle e-book

SIMPLE, straightforward everyday murder – a shooting, a knifing, a strangulation – is one thing; the macabre, repellent, debauched torture and dismemberment of bride-to-be Ella Butterworth is quite another.
A decade into his police career Sergeant Aector McAvoy is shell-shocked by the scene he uncovers in a nondescript flat in suburban Hull.
Once the offshore fishing capital of the world, Hull in early 2012 is a city in decay, ravaged by unemployment, disinterest and organised crime.
The abduction and subsequent discovery of Ella is merely the latest in a seemingly endless parade of atrocities. This time, however, the offender has been caught.
For once, opinion in Hull is undivided: the public, the media and the law agree almost to a person that Shane Cadbury – ‘The Chocolate Boy’ – is the despicable pervert who killed this beautiful young woman.
Or is he? McAvoy, as a lone dissenting voice, is not entirely sure.
As the officer whose investigation uncovered the corpse in Cadbury’s bedroom, McAvoy struggles to blot out the heinous scene he witnessed.
Yet, deep within himself he is uneasy. It is undeniable that the lumbering, intellectually awkward social misfit was in possession of the body, but is it possible that by the time he first crossed paths with Ella she was already dead?
Complicating matters, this is not the only case in front of McAvoy and his colleagues.
Press Association journalist Owen Lee could not have chosen a worse time to die. Having driven to a carpark at the northern end of the Humber Bridge, intent on diving into the murky, tempestuous estuary, Lee blunders into the midst of a gangland assassination. In a Sliding Doors moment, an instinctive desperation supplants despair and he reacts without thinking.
Now, his unintended survival is the trigger for a growing trail of missteps that explodes when professional duty draws him into Cadbury’s courtroom.

Camino Winds

19/6/2020

John Grisham: Hodder & Staughton $32.99

RARELY does John Grisham revisit a set of characters, regardless of how successful that cast’s original exploits have been. In Camino Winds, Grisham makes an exception.
The fact readers are served up a second helping of Mercer Mann and Bruce Cable is a gift in itself; that their reinvigorated storyline takes an entirely new direction makes this sequel an intriguing contrast to the original novel, Camino Island, and at the same time a release that deserves to stand independently on merit.
In this instalment bookstore owner Cable is the key to the plot while Mann takes a sideways step into a peripheral role.
Hurricane Leo has just carved its way across Camino, twisting, churning and inflicting on the pretty seaside village of Santa Rosa catastrophic destruction and at least one death.
When Cable is called to the property of lawyer-turned-novelist Nelson Kerr to identify a battered body, it seems his friend has become an unwitting victim of the storm’s ferocity.
However, prompted by local author Bob Cobb and college student Nick Sutton, Cable soon starts to question whether the fatal injuries were indeed inflicted by flying debris. Could at least three separate blows to the head really have been caused by windborne branches? Surely the odds of this having happened must be extraordinarily low, so what – or who – actually did kill Kerr?
In the chaotic aftermath of Leo, Cable, Sutton and Cobb start to examine the circumstances surrounding his demise and workshop credible explanations.
Kerr – a former FBI whistleblower known for focusing on corporate wrongdoing – had just put the final touches to his next best-seller-in-waiting so could its imminent publication have spooked someone into wanting him silenced? In theory nobody has yet seen this freshly completed manuscript and so far the police have not considered it worth investigating. It could well be the motive they’ve been lacking, however.

The Mist

5/6/2020

Ragnar Jónasson: Penguin $12.99 Kindle e-book

CHRISTMAS in Iceland is traditionally a season for giving new-release novels as presents, reading by candlelight and dining on smoked local lamb. It is not a season for finding uninvited visitors on one’s snow-covered doorstep.
When an unfamiliar man arrives at Erla and Einar Einarsson’s farm near Höfn in the east of the country, the couple feel obliged to offer him shelter. A blizzard is brewing and he’s on foot, having lost his way while out shooting ptarmigan with friends from Reykjavík – or so he says. His story is weak, however: he’s not carrying a gun, after all, and he claims not to have noticed their daughter Anna’s house as he approached the Einarsson property even though he followed the main road directly past it.
At the western extremity of the island, Hulda Hermannsdóttir is struggling to corral her own family into celebrating appropriately this year.
Husband Jón refuses to take teenager Dimma’s withdrawn, reclusive behaviour seriously, despite Hulda demanding that they consult a psychologist. It’s just typical adolescence, Jón insists. They’re yet to choose and decorate a Christmas tree, the last few gifts still haven’t been bought and the prospect of having her mother visit is gnawing at Hulda. What should be a happy, peaceful period is anything but.
Away from her chaotic homelife, a day in the office is equally excruciating for police officer Hulda. A young woman has been missing for months and her parents are frantic. Returning a phonecall from the girl’s family is right at the top of Hulda’s to-do list.
The third and final instalment in Jónasson’s Hidden Iceland series (also known as ‘the Hulda triology’), The Mist precedes both The Darkness and The Island chronologically in the saga of Hulda and her family so elaborates on situations only hinted at in the first two releases.

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.

Virusi

17/4/2020

Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $0.99 Kindle e-book

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

The Wife and the Widow

10/4/2020

Christian White: Affirm Press $16.99

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

The Tenth Girl

3/4/2020

Sara Faring: St Martin’s Press $20.72 Kindle e-book

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

The Good Turn

21/2/2020

Dervla McTiernan: HarperCollins $32.99

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

Mourning in Malmö

17/1/2020

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

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

A Silent Death

10/1/2020

Peter May: Hachette Australia $19.99

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

White Horses

6/12/2019

Rachael Treasure: HarperCollins $32.99

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

The Calendar Man | The Twelfth Night

29/11/2019

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

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

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.

The Body on the Beach

11/10/2019

Anna Johannsen: Thomas & Mercer $19.99

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

Five Midnights

4/10/2019

Ann Dávila Cardinal: Tor Teen $26.99

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

Blackout Ingenue

27/9/2019

Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $24

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

The Burnt Country

20/9/2019

Joy Rhodes: Bantam Australia $32.99

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

Valley of Death

13/9/2019

Scott Mariani: Avon $19.99

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

A Wolf at the Gate

6/9/2019

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

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

Undara

30/8/2019

Annie Seaton: Mira $29.99

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

The Long Call

23/8/2019

Ann Cleeves: Macmillan $17.99

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

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