Archive | New Releases

Matt Youkee
In June 2023, four children — Lesly, Soleiny, Tien, and Crispin — were found alive in the Colombian Amazon, forty days after the aircraft they were travelling in had crashed and killed the three adults on board (the pilot, the co-pilot, and the children’s mother).

The eldest child, thirteen-year-old Lesly, took the decision to leave her dying mother, gather her siblings — aged 9, 5, and 11 months — and head into the jungle. She kept herself and her siblings alive for 40 days and nights, finally emerging when heavily armed soldiers closed in, yelling her name above the sound of barking dogs.

Forty Days in the Jungle follows the compelling characters involved in the crash and what followed: Maria Fatima Valencia, the children’s grandmother, who had taught Lesly how to survive in the jungle; General Pedro Sánchez who led the rescue team; the shady figure of Manuel Ranoque, the father of the two youngest children; and even the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro.

Anne Sebba
In 1943 a women’s orchestra was formed at one of the most brutal death camps ever created on the order of German SS officers. Some forty-seven or so young girls who had been sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau from various countries, played in this hotch-potch band of hurriedly assembled instruments. For almost all of them it saved their lives.

Although several other camps boasted male orchestras, there was no other female orchestra in any of the camps, prisons or ghettos created by the Nazis. It lasted for little over a year and at its height reached a high level of performance largely thanks to a strict rehearsal timetable of at least ten hours a day insisted on by its conductor, the Austrian violinist, Alma Rosé.

How and why was the orchestra formed, who were its members and what was its role in Nazi propaganda? Was it aimed at masking the atrocities in the camps or to provide solace to the perpetrators? What was the effect on those who owe their survival to being a part of this project and the inevitable compromises that were made? Can this possibly be described as complicity with the Nazis?

These are just some of the tangled questions of deep moral complexity that Anne Sebba will examine as she tells the remarkable story of these women for the first time.

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.

Robert Gold
For Dr Jha, Haddley’s popular GP, it should be a routine home visit. So the shock of finding herself held hostage, together with her patient, in a seemingly random armed robbery, leaves her traumatised.

It’s not just the attack itself, but the strange and frightening memories that surface of another incident in that house. A house that, until the robbery, she believed never to have entered.

It’s lucky for her that it should be investigative journalist Ben Harper who is passing during the attack. Ben has a talent for getting to the truth, even when it means asking difficult questions.

He knows better than anyone, that in a place like Haddley, everyone has something to hide.

Neil Lancaster

A TRAGIC DEATH
When the body of Leanne Wilson is found at the bottom of a Scottish mountain, it is classified as a tragic accident. There is no evidence to suggest otherwise.

A RISING BODY COUNT
Then DS Max Craigie discovers that five other women in the last year have died by falling off mountains, and something feels very wrong. They were all experienced climbers and alone when they died. This can only mean one thing: there’s a killer on the loose.

A KILLER IN THE SHADOWS
The more Max investigates, the more he believes that they are dealing with something much bigger than a lone serial killer. With five victims and conflicting clues, how do you catch someone committing the perfect crime?

Fiona McCallum
Kind-hearted and practical psychologist Colin Palmer has spent decades helping his clients. Now he’s under pressure to retire and hit the road in a new caravan with his wife Joyce. However, when Joyce abruptly heads off on her own adventure, Colin’s perfectly ordered world is flipped upside down. He’s left grappling to make sense of their marriage, who he is and what he wants.

Enter no-nonsense, blunt, firecracker ex-nurse Shirley Royal! Recently widowed, Shirley is also searching for meaning after losing the bedrock of her existence. She’s ripe for a new project and Colin might just be it!

But just when Colin’s future appears bright and assured, thanks to Shirley’s friendship, Joyce tumbles back into his world. How will he now navigate a path between his old life and new?

David Baldacci
Fourteen-year-old Charlie Matters is up to no good, but for a very good reason. Without parents, peerage, or merit, ducking school but barred from actual work, he steals what he needs, living day-to-day until he’s old enough to enlist to fight the Germans. After barely surviving the Blitz, Charlie knows there’s no telling when a falling bomb might end his life.

Fifteen-year-old Molly Wakefield has just returned to a nearly unrecognizable London. One of millions of people to have been evacuated to the countryside via “Operation Pied Piper,” Molly has been away from her parents—from her home—for nearly five years. Her return, however, is not the homecoming she’d hoped for as she’s confronted by a devastating reality: both her parents are gone.

Without guardians and stability, Charlie and Molly find an unexpected ally and protector in Ignatius Oliver, and solace at his book shop, The Book Keep, where A book a day keeps the bombs away. Mourning the recent loss of his wife, Ignatius forms a kinship with both children, and in each other—over the course of the greatest armed conflict the world had ever seen—they rediscover the spirit of family each has lost.

But Charlie’s escapades in the city have not gone unnoticed, and someone’s been following Molly since she returned to London. And Ignatius is still reeling from a secret Imogen long kept from him while she was alive—something so shocking it resulted in her death, and his life being turned upside down.

As bombs continue to bear down on the city, Charlie, Molly, and Ignatius learn that while the perils of war rage on, their coming together and trusting one another may be the only way for them to survive.

Harlan Coben
Sami Kierce, a young college grad backpacking in Spain with friends, wakes up one morning, covered in blood. There’s a knife in his hand. Beside him, the body of his girlfriend. Anna. Dead. He doesn’t know what happened. His screams drown out his thoughts—and then he runs.

Twenty-two years later, Kierce, now a private investigator, is a new father who’s working off his debts by doing low level surveillance jobs and teaching wannabe sleuths at a night school in New York City. One evening, he recognizes a familiar face at the back of the classroom. Anna. It’s unmistakably her. As soon as Kierce makes eye contact with her, she bolts. For Kierce there is no choice. He knows he must find this woman and solve the impossible mystery that has haunted his every waking moment since that terrible day.

His investigation will bring him face-to-face with his past—and prove, after all this time, he’s nobody’s fool.

Steve Barry
War II involving a legendary lost treasure, worth billions, known as Yamashita’s Gold. 1945 . In the waning months of World War II, Japan hid vast quantities of gold and other stolen valuables in boobytrapped underground caches all across the Philippines. By 1947 some of that loot was recovered, not by treasure hunters, but by the United States government, which told no one about the find.

Instead, those assets were stamped classified, shipped to Europe, and secretly assimilated into something called the Black Eagle Trust. Present day . Retired Justice Department operative, Cotton Malone, is in Switzerland doing a favor for a friend. But what was supposed to be a simple operation turns violent and Cotton is thrust into a war between the world’s oldest bank and the CIA, a battle that directly involves the Black Eagle Trust. He quickly discovers that everything hinges on a woman from his past, who suddenly reappears harboring a host of explosive secrets centering around bitcoin. The cryptocurrency is being quietly weaponized, readied for an assault on the world’s financial systems, a calculated move that will have devastating consequences. Cotton has no choice. He has to act. But at what cost? From the stolid banking halls of Luxembourg, to the secret vaults of Switzerland, and finally up into the treacherous mountains of southern Morocco, Cotton Malone is stymied at every turn. Each move he makes seems wrong, and nothing works, until he finally comes face-to-face with the Atlas Maneuver.