Buderim Library
Top 50 Books You Can’t Put Down – Get Reading is back with the ultimate guide to the best Australian reads.
Beth Francis
After the breakdown of her relationship with Justin, Amy moves out of town to a small village. In her cosy cottage, with her kind next-door neighbour Meg, she’s determined to make a fresh start. But there are complications in store.
Though Amy has sworn never to risk her heart again, she finds her friendship with Meg’s great-nephew Mike deepening into something more. Until Mike’s ex-girlfriend Emma reappears on the scene – and so does Justin…
Kirsty Ferry
Another wonderful new story from Kirsty Ferry. Part of Kirsty’s Tempest Sisters series but they can all be read on their own.
This is Jessie’s story. Take a trip to the little bookshop by the sea …
Jessie Tempest has two main interests: reading books and selling books. Her little bookshop in the seaside town of Staithes is a cosy hideaway from the chilly Yorkshire wind, but it’s also Jessie’s sanctuary from the outside world.
When writer Miles Fareham and his son Elijah arrive to stay in the holiday apartment above the shop, it’s a test for Jessie who has always felt clueless when it comes to kids. But as she learns the story of the single father and the inquisitive eight-year-old, Jessie realises that first impressions aren’t always the right ones – and, of course, you can never judge a book by its cover!
Karin Slaughter
A small town hides a big secret… Who killed Emily Vaughn? Prom Night. Longbill Beach, 1982.
Emily Vaughn dresses carefully for what’s supposed to be the highlight of any high school career. But Emily has a secret. And by the end of the night, because of that secret, she will be dead.
Nearly forty years later, Andrea Oliver, newly qualified as a US Marshal, receives her first assignment: to go to Longbill Beach to protect a judge receiving death threats. But Andrea’s real focus isn’t the judge – it’s Emily Vaughn. Ever since she first heard Emily’s name a year ago, she’s been haunted by her brutal death. Nobody was ever convicted – her friends closed ranks, her family shut themselves off in their grief, the town moved on – so the killer is still out there. But now Andrea has a chance to find out what really happened…
Michael Robotham
The thrilling next instalment in the award-winning Cyrus Haven series sees Cyrus reckoning with his own dark and shocking past . . When a man is murdered and his daughter disappears, forensic psychologist Cyrus Haven must decide if Maya Kirk is running, hiding, or a hostage. Cyrus understands how killers think better than anyone; after all, he’s a survivor.
Evie is a troubled teenager with an incredible gift: she knows when someone is lying. She is working at a Nottingham bar when a second woman goes missing, a nurse with links to Maya Kirk. Both women have a secret they have tried to hide, but the past is never history.
Evie witnesses the second abduction, glimpsing the driver, but only two people believe her.
One is Cyrus.
The other is the killer.
Tess Gerritsen
Mothers know best . . . But who will listen? Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles are plagued by what seems like a completely senseless murder. Sofia Suarez, a widow and nurse who was universally liked by all her neighbors, lies bludgeoned to death in her own home.
But anything can happen behind closed doors, and Sofia seemed to have plenty of secrets in her last days, making covert phone calls to old contacts and traceless burner phones. When Jane finally makes a connection between Sofia and the victim of a hit-and-run months earlier, the case only grows more blurry. What exactly was Sofia involved in? One thing is clear: The killer will do anything it takes to keep their secret safe.
Meanwhile, Angela Rizzoli hasn’t had a decent night’s sleep in all the years since her daughter became a homicide detective. Maybe the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree. Nothing in her neighborhood gets by Angela – not the gossip about a runaway teenager down the block and definitely not the strange neighbors who have just moved in across the street. Angela’s sure there’s no such thing as coincidence in her sleepy suburb. If only Jane would listen; instead she writes off Angela’s concerns as the result of an overactive imagination. But Angela’s convinced there’s a real wolf in her vicinity, and her cries might now fall on deaf ears.
With so much happening on the Sofia case, Jane and Maura already struggle to see the forest for the trees, but will they lose sight of something sinister happening much closer to home?
Daniel Silver
“In wartime,” Winston Churchill wrote, “truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
For Britain’s counterintelligence operations, this meant finding the unlikeliest agent imaginable-a history professor named Alfred Vicary, handpicked by Churchill himself to expose a highly dangerous, but unknown, traitor.
The Nazis, however, have also chosen an unlikely agent: Catherine Blake, a beautiful widow of a war hero, a hospital volunteer – and a Nazi spy under direct orders from Hitler to uncover the Allied plans for D-Day…
Conn Igguiden
Ancient Greece, 5th century BC. The age of myths and legends has given way to the world of men. In the front rank stands Pericles, Lion of Athens.
Behind Pericles lies the greatest city of the ancient world. Before him, on land and at sea, stands the merciless Persian army. Both sides are spoiling for war.
Though still a young man, Pericles knows one thing: to fight a war you must first win the peace.
It’s time for a hero to rise. For his enemies to tremble. And for Athens, a city of wisdom and warriors, to shine with glory . .
Robert Harris
A member of a top-secret team of British cryptographers, Tom Jericho succeeds in cracking “Shark,” the impenetrable operational cipher used by Nazi U-boats, but when the Germans change the code, Jericho must break the new code before the traitor among his group can stop him.
Emma Partridge
The Widow of Walcha is a shocking true story about death, love and lies in the small NSW town of Walcha. All farmer Mathew Dunbar ever wanted was to find love and have a family of his own. That’s why, just months after meeting Natasha Darcy, the much-loved grazier didn’t hesitate to sign over his multi-million-dollar estate to her.
When Mathew died in an apparent suicide soon afterwards, in a stranger-than-fiction twist, Natasha’s estranged husband – who she was once charged with trying to kill – was the first paramedic on the scene after the murder.
Journalist and author Emma Partridge travelled to the cool and misty town of Walcha in the Northern Tablelands of NSW in the months after Mathew Dunbar’s death, drawn by the town’s collective worry that Natasha was going to get away with murder. Partridge spent months researching the case, interviewing Mathew’s friends, family and Natasha herself in an attempt to uncover her sickening web of lies and crimes.
The Widow of Walcha is about one of the most extraordinary criminal trials in Australia’s history and reveals Natasha’s sickening crimes against those she claimed to love, fuelled by her obsession with money.
Ruth Wilson
An uplifting and delightfully bookish memoir about an 89-year-old woman who reclaims her life by re-reading each of Jane Austen’s novels. As she approached the age of seventy, Ruth Wilson began to have recurring dreams about losing her voice.
Unable to dismiss her feelings of unexplainable sadness, she made the radical decision to retreat from her conventional life with her husband to a sunshine-yellow cottage in the Southern Highlands where she lived alone for the next decade.
Ruth had fostered a lifelong love of reading, and from the moment she first encountered Pride and Prejudice in the 1940s she had looked to Jane Austen’s heroines as her models for the sort of woman she wanted to become.
As Ruth settled into her cottage, she resolved to re-read Austen’s six novels and rediscover the heroines who had inspired her; to read between the lines of both the novels and her own life. And as she read, she began to reclaim her voice.
The Jane Austen Remedy is a beautiful, life-affirming memoir of love, self-acceptance and the curative power of reading. Published the year Ruth turns ninety, it is an inspirational account of the lessons learned from Jane Austen over nearly eight decades, as well as a timely reminder that it’s never too late to seize a second chance.