Archive | New Releases

Di Morrissey
When Australian Julie Reagan discovers a book written about wild Malaysia in the 1970s, she decides to find out more about the author – her great aunt. Why did her grandmother refuse to speak about her sister who disappeared from the family, 60 years before? What caused such a severe rift?

Julie is invited to stay with her cousins who run the plantation founded by her great grandfather in Malaya a hundred years ago, and she decides to visit in the hope of finding clues to this family mystery. What Julie finds sends her spiralling through generations of loves, deaths, tragedy and the challenges of the present until she discovers her grandmother’s shocking secret.

Val McDermid
Splinter the Silence is a novel centered on the mysterious deaths of several women who were the victims of vicious cyberbullying. Is it violence if it’s virtual? The outspoken women targeted by the increasingly cruel internet trolls and bullies would probably say so. For some of them, the torrents of bile and vicious threats prove too much. They begin to silence themselves in a series of high-profile suicides.

Or do they? Tony Hill isn’t convinced. But he’s the only one. Former cop Carol Jordan is too busy messing up her life to care. Until she gets an unexpected second chance. Now it’s game on, and the stakes have never been higher.

Mary-Lou Stephens
Tasmania, 1874. Growing up in the impoverished tenements along the Hobart Rivulet, Harriet Brown is used to doing whatever it takes to survive. Including, at just twelve years old, shearing off her hair and pretending to be a boy to secure a job as label-paster at the George Peacock and Sons jam factory.

Four years later, the deceit becomes too much to bear and Harriet risks everything on the chance at a future with her ambitious friend and workmate Henry Jones. But this decision forces her into a new deception: play the role of expert jam maker, or else be cast out onto the streets.

As the secrets and lies grow, Harriet is driven to more and more desperate choices. Choices that will end with a dangerous secret which, if discovered, could destroy not only her life but the lives of those she loves and protects.

Intertwined with the fascinating history of the Tasmanian jam industry and the striking historical figure Henry Jones, The Jam Maker is a tale of danger, deceit and the desperate measures one woman will take to succeed in love and life.

Lisa Jackson
The huge Victorian house on Lake Twilight belongs to Harper Reed Prescott, as does the private island on which it sits. Harper wants little to do with either. Twenty years ago, Harper’s grandmother died suspiciously while in her care, on the same night that Harper’s boyfriend disappeared. His body was never found, and no charges were filed. But the rumors haven’t faded. There have been other deaths, other accidents. All revolving around Harper and her family.

Now Harper’s marriage is over, her college-age daughter is estranged, and Harper just wants to sell the property and make a fresh start. Except returning to the lake has stirred everything up again. Whispers. Memories. And the persistent feeling that, as she gazes out at the houses across the water, she’s being watched in turn.

The whole town has always thought Harper has something to hide, and they’re right. But she might have even more to fear . .

Brian Freeman
Jason Bourne is on a boat in the Mediterranean moonlight with his lover, Johanna. He’s happy for the first time in years. Then in the next instant, he finds himself floating on wreckage as fire and smoke choke the sky. Johanna is gone. And Bourne finds the darkness of lost memory closing around his mind again.

As he did once before, Bourne must piece together the fragments of who he is, even as assassins hunt him across Europe. He teams up with his spy chief, Shadow, who reveals the shocking secret that Bourne’s surrogate father – David Abbott, the founder of Treadstone – is alive and missing. Together they must find Abbott before his enemies do.

But Shadow is a master of manipulation who won’t hesitate to betray Bourne to get what she wants. With his memory returning in bits and pieces, Jason discovers that the explosion that stole away his identity is part of a deadly game being played among powerful adversaries from Moscow to Washington. It’s a game with no winners – because even if he finds David Abbott, Bourne may still find himself with no way out and everything to lose.

Matthew Spencer
In Australia’s bucolic wine country, a homicide detective is on the hunt for a killer with a ruthless agenda in a gripping novel of suspense by the author of Black River. A young woman is found dead in her isolated town house in rural Red Creek, an up-and-coming wine tourism destination outside Sydney. No forced entry. No signs of struggle. And her geologist husband has an alibi, though it’s not exactly solid. While a tabloid journalist is quick to spin her own damning narrative, homicide detective Rose Riley is questioning everything she sees—especially in a rapidly developing community that already seems on edge.

While Riley and her partner, Priya Patel, work the case with a local detective, crime reporter Adam Bowman follows his own leads. Then forensic evidence matches that of a pair of unsolved murders elsewhere in two other married women, murdered months apart yet in the exact same manner. Riley realizes she’s dealing with a serial killer. But one whose victims weren’t random. These women were chosen, watched, and targeted for a purpose.

As the secrets in this small town emerge, the suspects mount. Now Riley must unearth the deadliest secret of all—the true motive behind the murders—before another woman dies.

Jack Beaumont
While recruiting a Russian human source embedded in the shadows of illicit financial networks, French spy Alec de Payns is abruptly pulled from the field. His new mission: exfiltrate a North Korean walk-in from Beijing who claims to know the details of a massive cyberattack that could destroy the world’s economy. But before the defector can utter a word, he dies in de Payns’ arms on the journey home.

The failure of such a routine job enrages France’s new prime minister, who views the covert actions of the DGSE – the French external spy agency – as a political liability. When de Payns’ next mission mysteriously collapses, the Company has no choice but to disavow him.

Now exposed, hunted across South-East Asia and cut off from official support, de Payns must survive alone, untangle a deadly conspiracy and protect his family. But in a world of deception, who can he trust? And who is truly pulling the strings in this deadly liar’s game?

Tony Park
A heart-stopping chase across South Africa to find Napoleon’s priceless lost sword, by the master of adventure, Tony Park. Three bodies are found scattered across South Africa. One on the shores of the Indian Ocean, one in a farm invasion in modern KwaZulu-Natal, and one in 1880, in the aftermath of the Anglo-Zulu War.

Detective Sannie van Rensburg and marine biologist and former soldier Adam Kruger are each on the trail of a mystery, while more than a century ago colonial police officer Peter Gregory has a secret to find the lost sword of the great Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. But he’s not the only one who wants it.

From the blood-soaked battlefields of colonial-era Zululand to the modern-day political struggles over land and poaching in South Africa and war in the Middle East, these investigations are on a dangerous collision course. Because people will kill for a symbol of power.

Adam Courtenay
Bryce Courtenay was one of Australia’s highest-selling and most-loved authors as well as a larger-than-life character. From his first book, The Power of One, he captivated readers. With his third, the non-fiction title April Fool’s Day, he captured their hearts. Many of his fans would have thought they knew him, and they did – they knew the version of him that he wanted to present to the world.

Bryce’s son Adam also knew that version. And he knew the Bryce the rest of the world only glimpsed, or never saw at all. His father was a natural born storyteller and occasional fabulist whose tales never quite felt true. He was a man who forever publicly grieved the loss of his son Damon, the subject of April Fool’s Day, but who seemed reluctant to connect with his remaining two sons.

Several years after his death, Bryce still looms large in Adam’s life. In seeking to understand his father, who made so many people happy with his books, Adam recounts his own 1960s and 1970s childhood, Bryce’s career in advertising and his metamorphosis into bestselling novelist. In the years after The Power of One, Bryce became a household name even as his personal life was plagued by tragedy and heartbreak – some of his own making. All the while Adam did his best to love his father and hang on through the wild ride of his life.