Archive | New Releases

Clive Small –

Milat – the serial killer who preyed on young hitchhikers. The backpackers – the innocent victims of a brutal murderer. Belanglo – a place that became synonymous with pure evil.

It was the biggest and most complex manhunt in Australian history, an investigation that gripped a nation. Behind the many false leads and dead ends, precious clues emerged that pointed to one man.
This is the story of how Ivan Milat was caught. Clive Small takes us inside the operation he led as his team painstakingly pieced together the evidence that put Milat behind bars. But questions remain. Did he act alone? Were there other victims? How much did his family know? And what of his great-nephew, who brutally killed a young man in 2010?

Chilling, forensic, compassionate – this is the definitive story that could only be told by someone at the centre of the police operation. It is also a powerful argument for the investigation of more than a hundred unsolved murders.

John Lever –

Adventurer, storyteller, traveller, John Lever has a dry, laconic wit and a life-long love of crocodiles. For almost half a century the crocodile has fascinated him; he counted, cajoled and courted them as a wildlife officer in the remote highlands of Papua New Guinea, before returning home to Australia to establish the first commercial crocodile farm in outback Queensland.

As the owner of Koorana Crocodile Farm, home to more than 3000 crocodiles, John knows almost everything there is to know about the Australian ‘Salty’. Kissed by a Croc is the story of a very big life lived among very big crocs.

This is the story of the original crocodile man.

Peter Grose-

They kept their heads down, they kept their mouths shut and they stuck together to offer sanctuary and shelter to over 3500 Jews in their small villages in the isolated upper reaches of the Loire. This is one of the great modern stories of unknown heroism and courage.

Nobody asked questions, nobody demanded money. Villagers lied, covered up, procrastinated and concealed, but most importantly they welcomed.

This is the story of an isolated community in the upper reaches of the Loire Valley that conspired to save the lives of 3500 Jews under the noses of the Germans and the soldiers of Vichy France. It is the story of a pacifist Protestant pastor who broke laws and defied orders to protect the lives of total strangers. It is the story of an eighteen-year-old Jewish boy from Nice who forged 5000 sets of false identity papers to save other Jews and French Resistance fighters from the Nazi concentration camps. And it is the story of a community of good men and women who offered sanctuary, kindness, solidarity and hospitality to people in desperate need, knowing full well the consequences to themselves.

Powerful and richly told, A Good Place to Hide speaks to the goodness and courage of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

Peter Stanley –

Australians remember the dead of 25 April 1915 on Anzac Day every year. But does anyone know the name of a single soldier who died that day? What do we really know about the men supposedly most cherished in the national memory of war? Peter Stanley goes looking for the lost boys of Anzac: the men of the very first wave to land at dawn on 25 April 1915 and who died on that day. There were exactly 101 of them: the first to volunteer, the first to go into action, and the first of the 60,000 Australians killed in that conflict.

Lost Boys of Anzac traces who these men were, where they came from, and why they came to volunteer for the AIF in 1914. It follows what happened to them in uniform and, using sources overlooked for nearly a century, uncovers where and how they died, on the ridges and gullies of Gallipoli—where most of them remain to this day. It shows how the lost boys were remembered by those who knew and loved them, and how they have since faded from memory.

John Connolly –

Prosperous, and the secret that it hides beneath its ruins . . .

The community of Prosperous, Maine has always thrived when others have suffered. Its inhabitants are wealthy, its children’s future secure. It shuns outsiders. It guards its own. And at the heart of the Prosperous lie the ruins of an ancient church, transported stone by stone from England centuries earlier by the founders of the town . . .

But the death of a homeless man and the disappearance of his daughter draw the haunted, lethal private investigator Charlie Parker to Prosperous. Parker is a dangerous man, driven by compassion, by rage, and by the desire for vengeance. In him the town and its protectors sense a threat graver than any they have faced in their long history, and in the comfortable, sheltered inhabitants of a small Maine town, Parker will encounter his most vicious opponents yet.

Charlie Parker has been marked to die so that Prosperous may survive.

Louisa Young –

The much-awaited sequel to the bestselling Richard and Judy bookclub pick, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You. London, April 1919. The war is over and Riley Purefoy and Nadine Waveney are free to start their married life. At only 23 it is all before them. But Riley’s physical damage from the war has left awkward tensions between him and Nadine – will the aftermath threaten to keep them at a distance from each other forever?

At Locke Hill, Peter and Julia Locke are facing their own trauma. With Peter living a reclusive life and drinking heavily to blot out the memories of war, can their marriage have a future? As each family must contend with the scars of the war, their lives become firmly intertwined. But after all those years of orders and terror and imminent death, can they ever truly move forward?

The highly anticipated sequel to the beautiful bestselling MY DEAR I WANTED TO TELL YOU sees the return of some much-loved characters and the devastating effects the war has had on them.

Wendy James –

From the bestselling author of The Mistake comes a hauntingly powerful story about families and secrets and the dark shadows cast by the past. Angie’s a looker. Or she’s going to be. She’s only fourteen, but already, heads turn wherever she goes. Male heads, mainly . . .

Jane worships her older cousin Angie. She spends her summer vying for Angie’s attention. Then Angie is murdered. Jane and her family are shattered. They withdraw into themselves, casting a veil of silence over Angie’s death.

Thirty years later, a journalist arrives with questions about the tragic event. Jane is relieved to finally talk about her adored cousin. And so is her family. But whose version of Angie’s story – whose version of Angie herself – is the real one? And can past wrongs ever be made right?

The shocking truth of Angie’s last days will force Jane to question everything she once believed. Because nothing – not the past or even the present – is as she once imagined.

Deborah Rodriguez –

From Kabul to a home by the Mexican sea … A life-affirming, sea-change memoir by the author of the international bestseller The Little Coffee Shop Of Kabul.

‘I hadn’t been planning on making Mexico my new home, but the little house on the sea was all that I had left…’ When her family faces kidnap threats after the publication of her first book, Deborah Rodriguez is forced to flee Kabul, leaving behind her friends, her possessions, the beauty school she helped found and her two beloved businesses: a beauty salon and a coffee shop. But life proves no easier ‘back home’.

After a year living on top of a mountain in the Napa Valley and teetering on the edge of sanity, Deborah makes a decision. One way or another she’s going to get the old Deb back. So, at the age of forty-nine, she packs her life and her cat Polly into her Mini Cooper and heads south to a pretty seaside town in Mexico.

Home is now an unassuming little house on Carnaval Street. There she struggles to learn Spanish, works out with strippers and spends her Sunday nights watching clowns. And maybe – just maybe – the magic of Mexico will finally give her what she’s always dreamed of: a life on her own terms . . .

M.J Aldridge –

Two hostages. One bullet. One lives. One dies.

They were going to spend the rest of their lives together. Soul mates. But when a young couple wakes up alone together, disorientated and trapped, they are yet to grasp the true horror of their situation. They have no food, no water. Instead there is a gun loaded with a single bullet and a mobile phone with enough power only to deliver a short message: ‘when one of you kills the other, the survivor will walk free’. For their captor it’s simple: set the scene, watch, wait and leave the victims to do the killing. Tortured by fear, desperation, starvation and thirst, there’s only one way to end their ordeal: one of them must die.

DI, Helen Grace and her team, know they are hunting a complex predator whose broken survivors must endure their role as living calling cards. And killers. The victims – work colleagues, a mother and daughter, a pair of dancers – appear to be chosen at random and yet the planning is meticulous. There must be something driving the choice of victims, but until DI Grace can establish a connection, the killer is unreachable. A breakthrough is elusive and then, terrifyingly, the investigation begins to turn full circle…
In this startling highwire drama M.J. Arlidge throws us headlong into a chilling race to stop evil in its tracks. Dark, ingenious and bullet-paced, Eeny Meeny introduces a major new thriller writing talent

Therese Creed –

After a couple of years working in a privileged private school, Lucy Francis yearns for adventure. So when she hears about a job teaching four children on a massive cattle property in North Queensland, she decides to throw caution – and her teaching job – to the winds.

When Lucy arrives at Charlotte’s Creek Station she finds a family in crisis. To make matters worse, the four children she’s been charged with educating are very spirited, not always cooperative, and dismally behind in their schooling.

To Lucy, the only person who seems to be keeping Charlotte’s Creek afloat is the family’s gruff stockman, Ted. With his support and encouragement Lucy throws herself into the day-to-day activities of the station and makes excellent progress with the children.

Though Lucy and Ted’s feelings for each other grow, Ted can’t see any future for them because of his lack of prospects. As the family divisions at Charlotte’s Creek prove insurmountable and the property looks set to be put on the market, Lucy faces returning to the city and leaving Ted behind. . .

By the betselling author of Redstone Station, this is the story of a strong young woman stepping into the unknown, trying to make things work, and finding love.