Peter James
Cold Hill House has been demolished to make way for a new housing estate. Luxury-living at its best with high specification gadgets all thrown in – part-exchange available for the right buyers.

The first two families move in, and as soon as they do, the unearthly residents of Cold Hill begin to make themselves known.

Nobody who moves into Cold Hill reaches their fortieth birthday, and the old couple that have just arrived . . . let’s just say their days are numbered.

Robert Harris
‘From what is it they flee?’ He took a while to reply. By the time he spoke the men had gone inside. He said quietly, “They killed the King.”

1660 England. General Edward Whalley and his son-in law Colonel William Goffe board a ship bound for the New World. They are on the run, wanted for the murder of King Charles I–a brazen execution that marked the culmination of the English Civil War, in which parliamentarians successfully battled royalists for control.

But now, ten years after Charles’ beheading, the royalists have returned to power. Under the provisions of the Act of Oblivion, the fifty-nine men who signed the king’s death warrant and participated in his execution have been found guilty in absentia of high treason. Some of the Roundheads, including Oliver Cromwell, are already dead. Others have been captured, hung, drawn, and quartered. A few are imprisoned for life. But two have escaped to America by boat.

In London, Richard Nayler, secretary of the regicide committee of the Privy Council, is charged with bringing the traitors to justice and he will stop at nothing to find them. A substantial bounty hangs over their heads for their capture–dead or alive. . . .

A.W. Hammond
He’ll do anything to save her … even work for the enemy.

August, 1944. In German-occupied Paris, former schoolteacher Auguste Duchene has stumbled upon an unusual way to survive: he finds missing people. When he’s approached by the French Resistance to locate a missing priest – and a cache of stolen weapons – Duchene initially refuses. But the Resistance offer him no choice. Within hours, he’s also blackmailed by a powerful Nazi into searching for a German soldier who’s suspected of deserting.

To fail at either task will have deadly consequences for Duchene – and for his daughter Marienne.

So begins a frantic race against time. As forces close in on Paris, Duchene has only 48 hours to locate the missing priest and soldier, or lose the only person he loves…

John Boyle

1946. Three years after a cataclysmic event which tore their lives apart, a mother and daughter flee Poland for Paris, shame, and fear at their heels, not knowing how hard it is to escape your past.

Nearly eighty years later, Gretel Fernsby lives a life that is a far cry from her traumatic childhood. When a couple moves into the flat below her in her London mansion block, it should be nothing more than a momentary inconvenience. However, the appearance of their nine-year-old son Henry brings back memories she would rather forget.

Faced with a choice between her own safety and his, Gretel is taken back to a similar crossroads she encountered long ago. Back then, her complicity dishonoured her life, but to interfere now could risk revealing the secrets she has spent a lifetime protecting.

Mike Carlton
When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, the British asked Australia for help. With some misgivings, the Australian government sent five destroyers to beef up the British Royal Navy in the Mediterranean.

HMAS Vendetta, Vampire, Voyager, Stuart and Waterhen were old ships, small with worn-out engines. Their crews used to joke they were held together by string and chewing gum; when the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels heard of them, he sneered that they were a load of scrap iron.

Yet by the middle of 1940, these destroyers were valiantly escorting troop and supply convoys, successfully hunting for submarines and indefatigably bombarding enemy coasts. Sometimes the weather could be their worst enemy – from filthy sandstorms blowing off Africa to icy gales from Europe that whipped up mountainous seas and froze the guns. Conditions on board were terrible – no showers or proper washing facilities; cramped and stinking sleeping quarters; unpleasant meals of spam and tinned sausages, often served cold in a howling squall. And always the bombing, the bombing. And the fear of submarines.

When Nazi Germany invaded Greece, the Allied armies – including Australian Divisions – reeled in retreat. The Australian ships were among those who had to rescue thousands of soldiers. Then came the Siege of Tobruk – Australian troops holding out in that small Libyan port city. The Australian destroyers ran ‘the Tobruk Ferry’ – bringing supplies of food, medicine and ammunition into the shattered port by night, and taking off wounded soldiers.

But the four destroyers now left were struggling, suffering from constant engine breakdowns, with crews beleaguered by two years of bombings, wild seas and the endless fear of being sunk. In late 1941 the ships were finally sent home, staggering back to Australia, proudly calling themselves the Scrap Iron Flotilla in defiance of the Goebbels’ sneer. That flotilla is now an immortal part of Australian naval legend, and this is its story.

Pradeep Bashyal
The untold stories of mountaineering achievements and tragedies – an oral history of the Sherpas. Changing the narrative of mountaineering books, Sherpa focuses on the people who live and work on the roof of the world.

Amid all the foreign adventurers that throng to Nepal to scale the world’s highest peaks there exists a small community of mountain people at the foothills of Himalayas. Sherpa tells their story. It’s the story of endeavour and survival at the roof of the world. It dives into their culture and tells of their existence at the edge of life and death. Written by Ankit Babu Adhikari – a writer, social science researcher and musician – and Pradeep Bashyal – a journalist with the BBC based in Nepal – Sherpa traces their story pre- and post-mountaineering revolution, their evolution as climbing crusaders with previously unpublished stories from the most notable and incredible Sherpas of the last 50 years.

This is the story of the Sherpas.

Ben Pobjie
In 100 Tales from Australia’s Most Haunted Places, Ben Pobjie communes with the spirit world to reveal Australia’s most spooky stories.

From the ghostly black horse of Sutton Forest to the Pollman of the Murdering Sandhills, the spectral headless horsemen of the Riverina to Dr Blood of North Kapunda Hotel (yes, his name really was Dr Blood), this book will send a shiver down your spine. Best read with the light on.

Alexander Mcall Smith
In this latest installment in the beloved No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, Grace Makutsi encounters a pair of quandaries that will require all of her and Mma Ramotswe’s cleverness and generosity to resolve.

Grace Makutsi’s husband, Phuti, is in a bind. An international firm is attempting to undercut his prices in the office furniture market. Phuti has always been concerned with quality and comfort, but this new firm seems interested only in profits. To make matters worse, they have a slick new advertising campaign that seems hard to beat. Nonetheless with Mma Ramotswe’s help, Phtui comes up with a campaign that may just do the trick.
Meanwhile, Mma Makutsi is approached by an old friend who has a troubled son. Grace and Phuti agree to lend a hand, but the boy proves difficult to reach, and the situation is more than they can handle on their own. It will require not only all of their patience and dedication, but also the help of Mma Ramotswe and the formidable Mma Potokwani in order to help the child.
Faced with more than her fair share of domestic problems, Mma Makutsi deals with it all with her usual grace. That, along with the kindness, generosity, and good sense that the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is known for, assure us that in the end, all these matters will be set right.

James Patterson
Nothing could tear Detective Michael Bennett away from his new bride—except the murder of the woman who was his partner, his best friend, and more. NYPD master homicide investigator Michael Bennett and top FBI abduction specialist Emily Parker have a history.

When Emily is found strangled in Washington, DC, only Bennett knows her well enough to find the perpetrator — or so he thinks. At every turn, Bennett discovers that she was a woman as adept at keeping secrets as she was at forging powerful connections. And that those closest to her had both the means and the motives to permanently silence her.

Bennett aches to return home to his new wife and the familiar chaos of his family. Yet he’s driven to perform the most brilliant detective work of his career, even as the dangerous shadows in Emily’s past are closing in around him.

Kayte Nunn
A decades-old crime threatens to tear apart three generations of women in this unputdownable mystery that will keep you gripped until its last heart-wrenching page. Almost every graduating class had a girl who disappeared.

1949 It is the coldest winter Orcades Island has ever known, when a pregnant sixteen-year-old arrives at Fairmile, a home for ‘fallen women’ run by the Catholic Church. She and her baby will disappear before the snow melts.

2013 Frankie Gray has come to the island for the summer, hoping for one last shot at reconnecting with her teenage daughter, Izzy, before starting a job as a deputy sheriff. They are staying with her mother, Diana, at The Fairmile Inn, soon to be a boutique hotel, but when an elderly nun is found dead in suspicious circumstances, and then a tiny skeleton is discovered in the grounds of the house, Frankie is desperate for answers.

At once an evocative, unsettling tale of past misdeeds and a crime thriller that will have you reading with your heart in your mouth, The Only Child is compulsively addictive storytelling from the international bestselling author of The Silk House.