Category: Fiction - Wabonga Press

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.

Manhattan Beach

26/1/2018

Jennifer Egan: Hachette $19.99

ANNA Kerrigan is intimately acquainted with the unconventional side of life.
Not only has Anna grown up in an all-female household in a rough-and-tumble area of Brooklyn with no man as its protector but her mother is a former Broadway chorus-line dancer, her younger sister is chronically disabled, her aunt is an aging alcoholic seductress whose looks are sagging and her now-absent father forged his way in the Great Depression by “running errands’ for one of New York City’s most notorious crime lords.
It’s hardly surprising that when Anna enters a workforce depleted by the demands of war she is not content to accept one of the menial conveyor-belt roles traditionally allotted to women.
Instead, Anna quickly sets her sights on becoming a Brooklyn Navy Yard maintenance diver – a position so elusive that far more men fail the rigorous training process than complete the life-threateningly dangerous and emotionally draining course.
Surviving in Brooklyn is a challenge for any young woman, let alone one employed on the waterfront. With her instructor manoeuvring openly against her and her classmates offering virtually no co-operation, let alone support, she appears to have little chance of succeeding.
Anna is single-minded in her determination to join the program, however, and equally set on investigating a wispy recollection from childhood that appears to link her late father, Eddie, with a handsome and charismatic New York club licensee and gang leader, Dexter Styles.
Her disregard for the social mores that reign in the 1940s pits Anna against not only conservative individuals within her own community but the broader New York hierarchy at large – a hierarchy that invariably favours men with influence or wealth over even the most resourceful and committed teenage girl.
Part family saga, part underworld thriller, Manhattan Beach delivers a masterfully imagined storyline fleshed out with intricate, factual historic detail.

The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

12/1/2018

Lars Mytting: Hachette $32.99

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

Where the Murray River Runs

5/1/2018

Darry Fraser: Harlequin $22.49

BENDIGO in the mid-1890s is an inhospitable place for any unwed mother, let alone one whose predicament is the result of a single afternoon’s alcohol-fuelled indiscretion with someone else’s sweetheart. Complicating the situation further, the father – unaware of the pregnancy – has been driven off his parents’ struggling orchard by the need to earn an income and is now living many days’ travel away in the South Australian Riverland.
A frontier goldmining town it may be, but Bendigo is nevertheless a community with clear moral standards – standards that in Mary Bonner’s case motivate the desperate teenager to follow the only course of action likely to bring redemption and marry an older stranger who agrees to assume responsibility for the coming child.
When the marriage quickly turns sour, fearing that her new husband will kill her Mary bequeaths the as-yet-unborn baby to a former schoolmate, Linley Seymour, whose aunt CeeCee runs a clandestine refuge for abused and abandoned women.
Mary’s foresight proves to be well founded and within hours of his birth the tiny boy is lifted from his dead mother’s bruised and bloodied arms and delivered to Linley.
What Toby’s ill-tempered stepfather does not know initially is that the baby was not Mary’s only possession; with him goes a substantial family inheritance willed by the terrified young wife in trust to her son.
Once realisation strikes, Gareth Wilkin’s fury snowballs.
Rather than feel relieved to be shed of “the brat”, Wilkin allows his frenzied rage to set in motion a course of vengeance that will force Linley and CeeCee out of their home and endanger a series of lives, including that of Toby’s biological father.
With colonial Bendigo, Renmark and the thriving paddlesteamer port of Echuca as its backdrop, this novel explores domestic violence as it existed more than century ago.

Whiteout

21/12/2017

Ragnar Jónasson: Orenda Books $19.99

ICELAND publishes more books per capita than any other country on Earth.
In December the population of 330,000 Icelandic-speakers observes a tradition known as the ‘Christmas book flood’: a full year’s worth of new titles is launched in a roughly week-long deluge, just in time to be wrapped (accompanied by a block of the finest-quality chocolate each) and gifted on Christmas Eve. Icelanders typically then spend the rest of that night snuggled up reading and snacking.
It’s little wonder Iceland’s literature is among some of the sharpest, most beautifully crafted anywhere in the world, influenced by an awe-inspiring, hauntingly bleak landscape, a small-town national psyche and a pervasive, disorienting mid-winter gloom.
Set in the immediate lead-up to Christmas, Whiteout is complete with its own reference to the customary Yuletide exchange of printed matter.
The fifth title in Jónasson’s Dark Iceland series, it continues the story of regional detective Ari Thór Arason and his police-force superior Tómas , now based in the capital, Reykjavík.
Ari Thór’s plans to spend the holiday season at home in Siglufjörður are disrupted by the discovery of a young woman’s body at the base of a cliff at Kálfshamarsvík on Iceland’s remote northwest coastline.
It seems she has jumped – or has she?
In fact, Ásta’s is the third apparent suicide to have occurred in almost-identically inexplicable circumstances – first her mother’s, then her younger sister’s in the girls’ childhood more than 20 years earlier, and now her own during an uncharacteristic, impulsive visit to the lighthouse her father once managed.
Suspicion sweeps across the elderly caretakers of the estate, housekeeper Thóra and her brother Óskar, and its businessman-owner Reynir and his neighbour and part-time farm worker Arnór.
Given the setting’s extreme isolation, this latest death must have involved at least one of these four people – but which one, and why?

Fatal Crossing

15/12/2017

Lone Theils: Echo $29.99

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

The Little Theatre by the Sea

8/12/2017

Rosanna Ley: Quercus $19.99

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

The Ice Star / In the Shadow of the Mountain

1/12/2017

Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press (Kindle e-books) $1.30 / $3.99

COMPLETING a pair of novels in a single calendar year is a rare achievement for any writer; having a third title in the series launched within the same 12-month period is an almost-unheard-of feat.
Yet this is precisely what Danish author Christoffer Petersen will achieve when the final instalment in his Konstabel Fenna Brongaard trilogy is published in its English translation on Christmas Eve.
Petersen’s first Greenlandic thriller, The Ice Star, opens with the torture of young Danish military special forces operative Brongaard by two foreign mercenaries in a hut in an isolated settlement far above the Arctic Circle in northeastern Greenland.
Brongaard has been on assignment with the government’s sled-dog patrol, an elite unit established to defend the sovereignty of Denmark’s biggest and most remote territory. Now, she is in the hands of a pair of unrelenting inquisitors who have executed her partner and seem determined to frame her for the sickening murder.
Brongaard’s sole chance of escaping rests with David Maratse, a local policeman in the village in which she is being held.
Set against the severity of Greenland’s harsh, icebound, arid terrain, Brongaard’s desperate scramble for survival leads from tiny Scoresbysund across thickly packed sea-ice onto a luxurious coastal expedition ship, where the passengers turn out to be every bit as formidable as the pursuers she has so far evaded on land, and to the high-rise offices of cut-throat corporate Canada.
The suspense continues in In the Shadow of the Mountain, in which the life-or-death action is set in three immensely contrasting locations: cosmopolitan Copenhagen, the Arizona desert in the US and an exploratory mine site outside Greenland’s capital, Nuuk.
The third episode in this Bourne-like Nordic adventure, the soon-to-be-released The Shaman’s House, will feature an Australian connection, linking the world’s two major islands on diametrically opposite sides of the globe.

I Am Watching You

24/11/2017

Teresa Driscoll: Thomas & Mercer £4.99

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

Sanctuary

17/11/2017

Judy Nunn: William Heinemann Australia $32.99

GEVAAR Island, 40 kilometres due west of tiny Shoalhaven on the West Australian coast, is an isolated, largely inhospitable place at the best of times. In the off season, when the fishermen whose huts are the only sign of civilisation among the rocks rarely leave port on the mainland, it’s entirely deserted.
Suddenly, the unplanned arrival of an Indonesian dinghy bearing nine battered, malnourished and dehydrated passengers breathes life into Gevaar’s cluster of colourful timber shacks with their neglected kitchen gardens and sparsely stocked cupboards.
The group comprises three couples, two single travellers and an energetic and resilient three-year-old boy for whom scrambling ashore on this remote outpost is the start of an exciting adventure.
One woman looks and sounds British; to those who aren’t familiar with the region, the rest could be from anywhere in the Middle East. In fact, they are citizens of five separate countries – Egypt, Iran, Syria, Kurdish Iraq and Afghanistan – with three religions and communicate in a mix of local languages linked together loosely by a blend of classical Arabic and somewhat rusty English.
All eight adults are hiding something: the triggers that prompted them to flee their homelands, their fears, their ambitions, their true identities.
At first glance the island is a haven for the bedraggled survivors, yet even as they settle into their makeshift community they begin to question what Australia’s reaction will be once their presence is discovered. Will this reportedly open and laid-back nation half a world away from their points of origin really welcome their impromptu appearance, as they’ve been assured it will, or will their uninvited occupation of Gevaar draw the ire of yet another set of hostile government officials?
Sanctuary’s author, actor-turned-bestselling-writer Judy Nunn, will be in Victoria to deliver a series of readings from her new novel in Gippsland next week.

Just Another Week in Suburbia

10/11/2017

Les Zig: Pantera Press $29.99

ONE week. Seven days. Surely change can’t happen so quickly as to completely overturn someone’s sedate, settled life in such a short time span – or can it?
High school English teacher Casper Gray enjoys the type of steady contentment his still-single childhood mate Luke covets. Blissfully ensconced in the suburbs, Casper is about to celebrate his seventh wedding anniversary with Jane, who works in IT.
Both have steady jobs, close friends and supportive colleagues.
Their tenacious little terrier, Wallace, seems equally satisfied with his routine of digging up the backyard by day and snuggling on the sofa with his master and mistress after dark.
To date the only significant challenge faced by the couple is their struggle to have a baby, and even this will be overcome, they’re certain, once they have managed to save for a course of IVF treatment.
Admittedly, their neighbours can be odd at times: boorish Vic, with his thug-like demeanour, and exquisite Chloe, who on occasion just might be a little friendlier than is necessary towards the married man next door.
The vice-principal of Casper’s school, Stuart, is also a disagreeable character, with his exacting expectations and officious, condescending attitude.
In general, however, the Grays are as happy together as Casper imagines it’s possible for any pair of people to be.
Then it happens: an accidental stumble in the middle of the night results in the contents of Jane’s handbag being scattered across the floor. Along with the usual makeup, keys and purse, something entirely unexpected is revealed.
Is Casper right to suspect his wife of harbouring a gigantic secret, or is paranoia leading him down a dangerous path from which there may be no return?
Melbourne author Les Zig chronicles the ensuing week’s events at a compelling pace complemented by dark humour and a touch of cheekiness.

Force of Nature

3/11/2017

Jane Harper: Macmillan Australia $32.99

CORPORATE retreat. It’s a term almost guaranteed to set off a shiver of fear in all but the most upwardly mobile, single-mindedly ambitious go-getting employee.
For accounting clerk Beth McKenzie few things could be less inviting than the prospect of spending four days ‘team building’ in the remote upper reaches of Gippsland with colleagues from BaileyTennants – among them, her twin sister Bree.
Also taking part in the five-woman, five-man orienteering survival exercise is one of Beth’s least favourite managers, Alice Russell, who at the age of 45 rules through intimidation.
Despite her apparently unwavering commitment to the firm, Alice has no desire to be there, either; her attention is several hundred kilometres away, split between a domestic crisis in the suburbs and an ultimatum delivered by the Australian Federal Police.
With tensions already simmering, the two groups set off in mid-winter into the Giralang Ranges, three hours’ drive east of Melbourne – but when the women emerge four days later, cold, hungry, wet and limping, Alice is no longer with them.
Hasn’t she made her own way back to the agreed pickup point, her fellow walkers ask the men. She’s not actually lost or, worse, injured, alone in the bush with dusk descending, is she? Unpopular though Alice is, nobody at BaileyTennants really wishes her ill – surely not.
As Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives on the scene he’s barely recovered from a life-threatening event of his own on the opposite side of the state. Accompanied by investigative partner Carmen Cooper, Falk is as desperate as anyone to find the missing accountant – but his motivation is not purely concern for her personal safety.
This second instalment in Melbourne journalist-author Jane Harper’s ‘Aaron Falk’ series is a fitting sequel to her debut novel, The Dry, adroitly juggling two parallel timelines as the disappearance and its aftermath unfold side by side.

The Templars' Last Secret

27/10/2017

Martin Walker: Hachette Australia $32.99

TUCKED away in the southwestern corner of France is one of the world’s most impressive collections of prehistoric art. The départment of Dordogne is known in international circles for a trio of drawcards: more than 1500 castles, abundant black truffles and the 600-plus irreplaceable Paleolithic paintings that line the Cave of Lascaux.
Within the Dordogne, Périgord is a normally sleepy, peaceful region, but in 21st-century France, extremist violence can flare without warning. Now, it seems, the Vézère Valley is being targeted – in a fictitious sense, at least.
The 10th release in Martin Walker’s ‘Bruno’ series opens with soldier-turned-village-police-chief Bruno Courrèges preparing to host the wedding in St Denis of two archaeologists.
The drafting of his speech must fit around his official duties, but in small-town rural France, policing is more often a matter of gently guiding delinquent teenagers back into the classroom than of investigating life-or-death cross-border crime.
For Bruno, the working week preceding his friends’ nuptials turns out to be an exception, however.
When the body of an unfamiliar woman is found sprawled at the foot of the once-grand Château de Commarque, with its Templar connections, it is apparent that her death was no accident. Unsuccessful attempts to identify the victim at first frustrate Bruno and his fellow law enforcers, then drive them to explore far beyond their usual boundaries – all the way to Israel and North Africa.
The trail of evidence they assemble spans thousands of years of Vézère history, beginning with the creation of the valley’s priceless artworks and extending through the Middle Ages, when knights returning from the Crusades were rumoured to have secreted their legendary treasure somewhere within the chateau.
Accompanied by his trusty basset hound Balzac, Bruno knows that for this tiny community, time to solve the mysterious killing – and in so doing stave off an infinitely bigger attack – is running out.

The Man from Talalaivka

20/10/2017

Olga Chaplin: Green Olive Press $33.95

WHEN Anglo-Australians think of World War II battle zones, the natural tendency is to list only those in which our own servicemen fought: Southeast Asia, the Pacific, North Africa, Western Europe. The unimaginable destruction that occurred as Hitler’s army swept across Eastern Europe is overlooked.
For a generation of immigrant Australians, however, the realities of life before and during that ‘other’ conflict were transported along with their meagre belongings when they fled to an adopted country on the opposite side of the world.
Olga Chaplin’s parents were among the many thousands of displaced Ukrainians who managed to regroup sufficiently to forge a contented, prosperous future in Australia. Her beautifully worded, fictionalised account of their experience has the ability to warm a reader’s heart one minute and summon tears the next.
The story of Petro ‘Peter’ Pospile opens in December 1929 in Talalaivka, a tiny administrative town in far-northern Ukraine.
Following the death of Russia’s socialist dictator Lenin, control has been seized by totalitarian tyrant Stalin. Stalin is pillaging Ukraine’s rich black-soil farmland, confiscating its produce to feed Russians while millions of Ukrainians starve.
A veterinarian, Peter is considered marginally more useful than the typical local worker, yet not even this can save his family from horrendous suffering under Stalinist rule.
After more than a decade of deprivation, he accepts the arrival of German soldiers in June 1941 as just one more chapter of a never-ending ordeal. He cannot foresee that he and Evdokia will soon be sent to labour camps in Germany, Peter to fight Allied-bomb blazes in Berlin and Wilhelmshaven and his wife to manufacture munitions on an assembly line.
Eventually peace is declared but the couple’s long-entrenched distress is not easily banished: as homeless, stateless refugees, they continue to fear the Soviets’ reach and struggle to create a stable new existence for themselves.

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