Archive | New Releases

Helen Walmsley

Sixty is the new forty, we’re constantly told. Or is it that seventy is the new fifty?

Yet fashionable clothes shops cater for little but elfin twenty-year-olds; magazines carry little but articles about appearing younger. Heaven forbid you try to apply for a job…

Older women are permitted to be either part of the slippers and cardigans brigade, or to cling desperately to their youth and insist on being ‘young at heart’. Can’t there be a third way? A way to age with grace, security, beauty and adventure, and a way to keep your identity against a growing tide of voices telling you how you’d be happier if only you looked ten years younger.

Covering topics from family, finances and work to cosmetics, fashion and sex, The Invisible Woman – which is also Helen’s Guardian column nom de plume – is a new sort of book about ageing; one that teaches us not how to avoid it, but how to enjoy it, grow with it, and thrive.

Brigid Keenan

Brigid Keenan was a successful young London fashion journalist when she fell in love with a diplomat and left behind the gilt chairs of the Paris salons for a large chicken shed in Nepal. Her bestselling account of life as a “trailing spouse,” Diplomatic Baggage, won the hearts of thousands in countries all over the world.

Now, in her further adventures, we find Brigid in Kazakhstan, where AW, her husband, contracts Lyme disease from ticks, the local delicacy is horse meat sausage, and Brigid’s visit to a market leads to a full-scale riot from which she requires a police escort. Then, as the prospect of retirement looms, Brigid finds herself on the cusp of a whole new world: shuttling between London, Brussels, and their last posting in Azerbaijan; navigating her daughters’ weddings while coping with a cancer diagnosis; and getting a crash course in grand-motherhood as she helps organize a literature festival in Palestine.

Along the way, dauntless and wildly funny as ever, Brigid learns that packing up doesn’t mean packing in as she discovers that retiring and moving back home could just be her biggest challenge yet.

Warren Brown

When Harold Bell Lasseter disappeared it could have been the end of a mystery that began the day he staggered out of the desert at the turn of the 20th century, almost dead, his pockets bulging with gold, claiming to have found a 15 kilometre gold reef. It was mystery that deepened when he and a surveyor returned to the isolated and mysterious Petermann Ranges where the reef was supposed to be located – and couldn’t find it. It became legendary when the largest inland expedition since Burke and Wills was launched and, from the start, like Burke and Wills, was doomed because the partners only had one thing in common: greed.

In LASSETER’S GOLD, Warren Brown vividly recreates the drama of the search – the characters, the fights, the soaring temperatures, the impossible terrain, the plane crash, the pistol-carrying dingo-skinner who appeared out of nowhere. He also asks just who was this man Lasseter? A one-time sailor, a bigamist, a man who claimed John Bradfield stole his plans for a single span bridge to cross Sydney Harbour – was he also a very, very good liar? The entries in Lasseter’s diaries suggest he did find the gold, but that by then it was too late. The expedition had finished, he was alone and what he needed was food. Or did he? Was the body they found even his? What did happen to his vast, lost treasure? Did it ever exist? Does it still exist?

LASSETER’S GOLD is the gripping story of an outback legend, a myth and, perhaps, a field of gold – there for the taking?

Elizabeth Hadly

In ‘End Game’, world-renowned scientists Anthony Barnosky and Elizabeth Hadly draw on their work to explain the growing threats to humanity as the planet edges towards a resource war for remaining space, food, oil and water. And as they show, these wars are not the nightmares of a dystopian future but are already happening today.

They explore the origins of Ebola in densely populated areas of south-eastern Guinea, witness raging fires in Yellowstone and Colorado and explain how drought-induced food shortages are already causing problems in the Sudan, Gaza Strip and Iraq. Finally, they ask: at what point will inaction become the break-up of the intricate workings of the global society?

The planet is in danger now, but the solutions, as Barnosky and Hadly show, are still available. We still have the chance to avoid the tipping point and to make the future better. But this window of opportunity is closing fast and will shut within ten-to-twenty years. ‘End Game’ is the call we need.

John Lescroart

From New York Times bestselling author John Lescroart, a riveting new novel of legal suspense featuring Dismas Hardy and his daughter, Rebecca, now grown up and an associate in Hardy’s law firm.

Late one night, a teenage African American foster child named Tanya Morgan plummets to her death from the overpass above San Francisco’s Stockton tunnel. But did she fall…or was she pushed? Rushing to produce a convictable suspect in the glare of the media spotlight, homicide inspectors focus their attention on a naïve young man named Greg Treadway. Greg is a middle school teacher and he volunteers as a Special Advocate for foster children. At first, the only thing connecting him to Tanya’s death is the fact that they shared a meal earlier that night. But soon enough, elements of that story seem to fall apart…and Hardy’s daughter, Rebecca, finds herself drawn into the young man’s defense.

By the time Greg’s murder trial gets underway, Dismas and Rebecca have unearthed several other theories about the crime: a missing stepfather who’d sexually assaulted her; a roommate who ran a call girl service; a psychologically unstable birth mother; and a mysterious homeless man who may have had dealings with Tanya. Or Greg Treadway himself, who is perhaps not all that he first appeared. But how will they get these theories in front of a jury? And if they can, what price will they have to pay?

With signature suspense and intricate plotting, The Fall puts Dismas Hardy and his only daughter in the middle of one of John Lescroart’s most complex and thrilling cases yet. This Thing of Darkness. Harry Bingham. The fourth novel featuring Fiona Griffiths, crime fiction’s most unusual police detective. A marine engineer who tumbles off a cliff path on a windy night. A burglary where everything taken was returned by the thief.
The suicide of a man in love with life.

An accident, a mystery, an unexplained tragedy. And nothing at all to connect them. Until, that is, Detective Constable Fiona Griffiths, searching for something – anything – to take her mind off the tedious job of evidence-cataloguing she’s been assigned to, starts to wonder if all three incidents are not quite what they seem. It could just be her imagination. After all, she’d be the first to admit that she isn’t exactly in the prime of psychological health right now, the darkness she’s held at bay ever since she joined the police force now lapping dangerously at her door.  But something tells her there are invisible threads linking the crimes, and as she investigates further, she starts to see the outlines of a conspiracy so unlikely and on such a vast scale, that it takes her breath away. And that’s when they come for her.

Kathy Reichs

The latest blockbuster suspense novel in the pulse-pounding Temperance Brennan series, from #1 New York Times bestselling author and forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs.

For every case Temperance Brennan has solved, there remain innumerable unidentified bodies in her lab. Information on some of these is available online, where amateur sleuths sometimes take a stab at solving cases. One day, Tempe gets a call from Hazel “Lucky” Strike, a web sleuth who believes she’s successfully connected a body in Tempe’s lab to a missing persons report on an eighteen-year-old named Cora Teague. Since the bones in her lab do seem to match Cora’s medical records, Tempe looks into the case, returning to the spot where the bones were originally found. What seems at first to be an isolated tragedy takes on a more sinister cast as Tempe uncovers two more sets of bones nearby.

When she then learns that the area is known as a viewing point for a famous unexplained light phenomenon with significance for a local cult, Tempe’s suspicious turn to murder by ritual sacrifice—a theory thrown into question when Hazel herself turns up dead.

Still reeling from her mother’s diagnosis and the shock of Andrew Ryan’s potentially life-change proposal, Tempe races to solve the murders before the body count climbs further.

Alex Kava

Most of them were asleep in their beds when the ground gave way. . . .

When Ryder Creed responds to a devastating mudslide in North Carolina, he knows the difference between finding survivors and the dead—is time. Heedless of the dangers, Creed and his best search-and-rescue dog Bolo frantically wade through the chaos of twisted tree limbs, crumbled cement, and unrecognizable debris, when a second slide catches up with Ryder. And he is buried alive.

Bolo makes it out, though, and leads the heroic rescue of his master. What they get when they pull Ryder out from the mud is much more than they bargained for. The secrets in the mud around Creed run deep, pointing to a possible serial killer and unexpectedly dredging up painful, hushed-up pieces of Creed’s own past. The mysteries unearthed will bring Ryder Creed face-to-face with his past loyalties, deeply embedded survivor’s guilt, and a powerful figure from his past. He’ll have to rely on his dogs if he wants to make it through alive.

Jason Matthews

Captain Dominika Egorova of the Russian Intelligence Service has returned from the West to Moscow. She despises the men she serves, the oligarchs, and crooks, and thugs of Putin’s Russia. What no one knows is that Dominika is working for the CIA as Washington’s most sensitive penetration of the Kremlin.

As she expertly dodges exposure, Dominika deals with a murderously psychotic boss, faces assassination attempt and counter-intelligence ambushes, and must rescue a compromised agent and somehow spirit him out of Russia from under the noses of her pursuers. Complicating it all is Dominika’s relationship with her CIA handler, Nate Nash. And when a mole in Moscow finds her name on a classified list of sources, it is a virtual death sentence . . .

With the brilliant Palace of Treason, CIA veteran Jason Matthews confirms his position as the most exciting spy writer alive. This is as good as it gets.

Patrick Lee

A Desperate Plea for Help. The middle of the night. Sam Dryden takes a call from an old friend from his days in the military. She needs his help. Urgently. There’s no further explanation.

A Race Against Time. Two hours later, Dryden and his former teammate smash their way into a remote desert shack. Inside they discover four young girls, caged and threatened with death by their abductor. Dryden acts.

An Impossible Secret. But how had Dryden’s friend known what was about to unfold? Why is it so important that they flee the scene before the police arrive? The extraordinary truth is hard to comprehend. But the consequences are only too easy to grasp. Dryden now faces a ruthless enemy that is determined to contain and control knowledge of a world-changing discovery. And who will always be one step ahead . . .

Deborah Moggach

‘Nobody in the world knows our secret… that I’ve ruined Bev’s life, and she’s ruined mine.’

Petra’s romantic life has always been a car-crash, and even in her sixties she’s still capable of getting it disastrously wrong. But then she falls in love with Jeremy, an old chum, visiting from abroad. The fatal catch? Jeremy is her best friend’s husband.

But just as Petra is beginning to relax into her happy ever after, she finds herself catapulted to West Africa, and to Bev, her best friend who she’s been betraying so spectacularly. Meanwhile, on opposite sides of the world, two other women are also struggling with the weight of betrayal: Texan Lorrie is about embark on the biggest deception of her life, and in China Li-Jing is trying to understand exactly what it is her husband does on his West African business trips. . .

It turns out that no matter where you are in the world, everyone has something to hide. Can Bev – can anyone – be trusted?