Lynda La Plante
The husband of a prominent and infamously ruthless barrister is found in horrific condition after a robbery and brutal assault. Now in a coma, a major investigation is launched using the newly formed, experimental Metropolitan Police Serious Crime Analysis Unit.

Jessica Russell is an experienced CSI with degrees in psychology and criminology with an exceptional Masters in Investigative psychology and behaviour analysis. But Jessica’s first job as team leader of MSCAN is entirely new to to bring together a team of three trusted officers.

Between them, the team has dealt with every kind of murder and major crime scene – their expertise ranges from forensic DNA to blood spatter analysis, digital forensics and beyond. Now they must piece together the complex puzzle at the heart of this brutal crime. If it was a robbery gone horrifically wrong, what was so important to have been stolen?

Constance Petrie. CLASSICS
Constance Campbell Petrie’s book about her father is an important document from the good kind of early Australian settlers. Tom Petrie attended one of the earliest schools in Brisbane, with Aboriginal classmates who taught him their languages. There is a glossary of words and place names at the back of the book, which is excellent. Tom Petrie recalls the early days of Brisbane town from the 1830s, the Turrbal or north-side Aborigines, and their places and practises.
Tom is allowed by his parents to “go walkabout” with the Aborigines, as they do the triennial walk to the Bunya Mountains for the Bunya Nut festival. He tells us of the dawn-time “Cry of the Dead” which local Aborigines made in their camps. He walked the Aboriginal trails linking campsites, Bora Rings, and Pullen Pullen fighting grounds. I was excited by Petrie’s mention of which tribes frequented which grounds, as his words linked my friends in the Cressbrook family to the Bora Grounds near Samford, and the Roma St Pullen Pullen ground. An invaluable resource.

The Petries treated their Aboriginal neighbours with mercy and respect, but the author outlines the poisoning and shooting of Brisbane Aborigines by the police and racist settlers.

Eric Lambert. CLASSICS
THE NORTH AFRICAN WORLD WAR II. Their officers called them a stinking, lazy, drunken rabble and their friends said they took the colonel prisoner, burnt down their officers’ mess and drove off the military police with heavy rifle-fire. This is the unforgettable story of the gallant men of the the fearless and fatalistic Diggers of the Western Desert.

Twenty thousand men were on their way to the deserts of Egypt and some had joined up for adventure, some were on the run from the police, for others, the army meant three meals a day and a bed to sleep in.From an induction camp in Australia to the siege of Tobruk, the savage intensity of Second X Battalion’s experiences is not for the faint hearted. How soon will death silence so many of these brave voices and how many will ring out beyond the brutality of the battlefield?

Russell Braddon. CLASSIC
Russell Braddon wrote The Naked Island in 1950. By 1968 it had been reprinted eleven times and sold one million copies in Britain alone. As the author states, ‘It was written to tell the world what sort of people the Japanese can be. It was written to explain what they did in the war and what they might well do again.’

There are numerous books on the war in the East but this is one of the greatest. Often hilarious, even amidst the horror, this is the story of what the Japanese did to those they captured. It is written in prose all the more effective for its dry understatement and sharp observation by a man who never lost his will to live even in the most terrible circumstances. Braddon’s story is however not that simply of a prisoner of war. In his comments on the equally brutal Japanese treatment of native workers and indeed any who were not Japanese, he reveals the hollow reality of the ‘Greater Asian co-prosperity sphere’ promised by the Japanese, and attempts to understand how one group of human beings could behave in such a way towards another and the inhuman ideology and fanaticism which drove the Japanese on.

Marjorie Barnard. CLASSICS
Australian history has been written for over two centuries beginning with European explorers and colonists attempting to convey something of the complexity of the strange upside-down world they encountered in the southern hemisphere. Of course, aboriginal peoples had lived in Australia for millennia before the arrival of the whites.

Modern Australia has its foundations in these two cultural strands. Intertwined with these are the impact of colonialism and federation, indentured servitude and convict transportation, the effects of El Nino on European-style farming techniques, gold rushes, and longstanding issues of ethnicity, immigration, and religious tolerance. Covering these topics and more, this most recent and up-to date narrative history of Australia includes a timeline of major events, a biographic sketches of noteworthy historical figures, and a bibliographic essay.

Noted historian of Australia, Francis Clarke, provides a complete, comprehensive, and contemporary account of the political, economic, and cultural forces of each period of Australian history and gives readers a clear understanding of the many factors that have shaped the country. Written for a general audience, The History of Australia is the perfect introduction to Land Down Under.

Mandy Magro
Country-loving Dallas Armstrong is a hard-as-nails bull rider, who dreams of becoming Australian champion, just like his father, Mick, was. But when he discovers a shocking secret about his father on the same day Mick dies in a car accident, Dallas’s world is turned upside down. Now it’s up to him to protect his mother from the truth, and to keep the family farm Rollingstone Ridge afloat. And he will do everything in his power to do so.

Charlize Dawson is a successful city journalist whose marriage is in tatters. Begrudgingly sent to the country to write about Dallas, she is surprised to find that he isn’t the arrogant cowboy she’d assumed he’d be. Instead she and Dallas and share an intense chemistry and deep connection that lead to a stolen kiss at the Rodeo Ball.

But when Charlize’s research for her article puts her on the path of uncovering Dallas’s secret, he demands she stop or lose him forever. Dallas or her career, which should she choose? How can she turn her back on the people who have welcomed her into their lives with open arms, all in the name of her job? Her career is all she has left, and she has worked so very hard to be where she is. But how can she reveal what she knows, if it means losing the love of her life?