Category: Relationships - Wabonga Press

The Shadow Writer

21/6/2019

Eliza Maxwell: Amazon $23.99

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

The Place on Dalhousie

24/5/2019

Melina Marchetta: Viking $32.99

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

The Spanish Promise

17/5/2019

Karen Swan: Macmillan $29.99

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

The Mother-in-Law

22/2/2019

Sally Hepworth: Macmillan Australia $29.99

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

The Forgotten Children

8/2/2019

Isabella Muir: Outset Publishing $29.50

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

The Colours of all the Cattle

25/1/2019

Alexander McCall Smith: Hachette Australia $29.99

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

The Tenth Island

11/1/2019

Diana Marcum: Amazon $30.75

NINE main islands make up the Azores; the 10th so-called “island” of the archipelago is the diaspora created by emigration after natural and political disasters ranging from volcanic eruptions to intellectual oppression and physical starvation under the rule of Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar.
Around the world communities of expatriate Azoreans thrive – nowhere more robustly than in the Central Valley of California, the fruit-and-vegetable-bowl of the US and one of the country’s most productive dairying regions thanks to farmers who originated in the Azores.
Now an autonomous region of Portugal, the Azores remain a haven for these loyal natives, many of whom fly in when possible to spend at least part of the northern summer socialising “back home”.
In this memoir Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Diana Marcum becomes acquainted with a cross-section of Atlantic-born Portuguese-Americans while writing for a regional newspaper in the valley and for the Los Angeles Times.
A brief initial visit to the rural island of Terceira fuels Marcum’s appetite so powerfully that it is inevitable she will one day return for a much longer stay.
The resulting year in a small agricultural village on Terceira’s northern coast allows Marcum to resurrect friendships founded a decade earlier and provides rich detail for this personal portrait of an island group that manages to balance an optimistic present and future with an intense respect for a deeply traditional past.
At the same time Marcum explores issues within her own life, including unfulfilling relationships and a career that has not always followed an outwardly clear trajectory.
With irreverence and humour, sensitivity and passion, she documents the personalities, practices and predicaments that set the distinctive people of Terceira apart as they dodge bellowing bulls, lament lost love, impress with newfound Californian prosperity, savour chewy shellfish and revere crusty home-delivered bread.

The Year of the Farmer

7/12/2018

Rosalie Ham: Picador Australia $32.99

NORMALLY there’s nothing even vaguely amusing about irrigation cutbacks, drought-crippled farms, disintegrating communities, dog-mauled livestock and neighbours fighting not only each other but in some cases even themselves.
Rosalie Ham can add a wickedly satirical twist to any storyline, however, generating wry smiles and sly sniggers with her caricatures of stereotypically flawed individuals who under any other circumstance would be irretrievably irksome.
Take, for instance, Ham’s cross-section of residents in a fictitious Riverina town whose once-robust river is now barely flowing.
Mitch and his wife Mandy are at odds, hurried into marriage by an imagined pregnancy after Mitch’s high-school sweetheart, Neralie, decided to broaden her horizons – and love-life – by moving to Sydney.
Lana and Jasey, on the other hand, share the same boyfriend: Kevin. It’s an unconventional arrangement that gives the gossips plenty of inspiration, but as far as these best friends are concerned, having half of Kevin is preferable to having all of any one of the area’s supposedly eligible men. They have a point.
So dire is the outlook that when a new water authority representative sweeps onto the scene in his cycling lycra, legs shaved and receding hairline combed over, it’s not only the young singles who suddenly develop a taste for break-of-dawn power-exercising.
But Stacey’s mission is more about retrieving water – and in so doing padding his commission-based takehome pay – than winning female hearts. His partners in the plan, Glenys and Cyril, are the scourge of the district, shunned for controlling the river’s flow either too tightly or not nearly tightly enough, depending on where individual priorities lie.
At the heart of it all is an overarching mystery: who now owns local pub? It’s been sold, they all know, and renovations are in progress, but what will this mean for their one remaining reliable watering hole?

Vodka and Apple Juice

30/11/2018

Jay Martin: Fremantle Press, $27.99

JAY Martin is embarking on what appears to be every other Australian woman’s dream: spending three years as a lady of absolute leisure in northern Europe.
Accompanying husband Tom Armstrong on his diplomatic posting to Poland, Martin is at first excited by the promise of free time in which to explore their adoptive city, Warsaw, and its surrounding regions.
The novelty wears thin after only a few weeks, however, and in place of the initial wave of exoticism Martin feels herself quickly drowning under a tsunami of helplessness and rebellion as she struggles to read grocery labels, use public transport and make interpersonal connections in an entirely unfamiliar culture.
Her attempts to master a language of ‘ssshhhhhhes’ leave her mentally exhausted, and the sense of loss brought on by having stalled her own career as a senior political communicator in Canberra in order to travel with her husband leave Martin longing to reclaim the demands of full-time work with its structure and routine. The life of a non-working expatriate wife, it seems, is not the idyllic existence outsiders imagine it to be.
As Armstrong becomes increasingly ground down by his obligations to the embassy, Martin finally starts to regain her characteristic confidence, creating a role for herself as a freelance reporter and establishing a small but meaningful circle of loyal and engaging friends, both local and foreign.
In the process she explores areas of Poland few tourists visit, accepts that vegetarianism is an unfathomable concept to meat-loving pierogi traditionalists and develops a penchant for generous servings of vodka-spiked apple juice.
Yet, as the seasons tick slowly by and the emotional strain on her marriage intensifies, Martin begins to wonder whether she will ever settle comfortably into the apparently endless round of exhibition openings, cocktail parties, black-tie dinners and receptions for Australian government VIPs.

The Distant Shore

16/11/2018

Suzannah Thirlwall: $4.99 (Kindle edition)

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

Wild Fire

28/9/2018

Ann Cleeves: Macmillan, $29.99

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

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.

No Going Back

30/3/2018

Lisa Kennedy: Echo Publishing, $32.99

“I FEEL guilty and… ashamed. I’m one of those stories you hear about in the news.” Lisa Kennedy’s candid admission sums up the shock and humiliation of having been deceived absolutely by her partner of almost a decade.
Very few Australians know Kennedy’s name. The situation could have been quite different, however, had a story filmed by current affairs program 60 Minutes been broadcast as planned.
In 2010, during what was intended to be a brief visit to introduce baby Daniel to his grandparents and aunt in Istanbul, Kennedy’s Turkish-born husband announced without warning that he had initiated divorce proceedings against her and that their son would live with him. Daniel was seven months old at the time.
After eight years of marriage, Kennedy was completely alone in an unfamiliar country where she spoke only a few words of the local language and whose laws were at best confusing and at worst unashamedly biased against foreigners.
The Australian Government was unable to intervene in what was essentially a domestic matter as far as the Turkish legal system was concerned.
Without her own parents, siblings or friends around her, Kennedy was left to choose between two unpalatable options: concede that she would never regain her son and return quietly to her old life in Melbourne, or dig in stubbornly and weather the antagonism being directed towards her by her husband and his family to continue fighting an expensive and emotionally exhausting battle for Daniel’s custody. Kennedy chose the latter.
When their case was eventually referred to the Family Court in Australia, the report was placed on hold by 60 Minutes. Seventeen months later a film crew from the program was detained by the authorities and an Australian child-recovery operative was jailed for their role in an eerily similar situation involving two Australian-born children Lebanon.

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 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 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.

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?

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.

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