1979 by Val McDermid ($33, PB)
1979. It is the winter of discontent, and reporter Allie Burns is chasing her first big scoop. There are few women in the newsroom & she needs something explosive for the boys’ club to take her seriously. Soon Allie & fellow journalist Danny Sullivan are exposing the criminal underbelly of respectable Scotland. They risk making powerful enemies—and Allie won’t stop there. When she discovers a home-grown terrorist threat, Allie comes up with a plan to infiltrate the group & make her name. But she’s a woman in a man’s world— and putting a foot wrong could be fatal. First in a new series.
The Cellist by Daniel Silva ($33, PB)
Once Russia’s richest man, Viktor Orlov is now in exile in London, where he is waging a crusade against the kleptocrats who have seized control of the Kremlin. When he is killed by documents contaminated with a deadly nerve agent, the police determine they were delivered by a prominent investigative reporter. This reporter vanishes hours after the killing & MI6 concludes she is a Moscow Centre assassin. But Gabriel Allon believes his friends in British intelligence are dangerously mistaken. His search for the truth will take him to Geneva, where a private intelligence service is plotting an act of violence that will plunge an already divided America into chaos.
The Orchard Murders by Robert Gott ($30, PB)
In 1944, in the outer-Melbourne suburb of Nunawading, a brutal triple murder heralds the return of a long-forgotten cult. A man named Anthony Prescott has declared himself the Messiah & there are those who believe him & who are ready to kill in his name. Inspector Titus Lambert of the Melbourne Homicide unit, whose detectives are over-stretched, requests the discreet assistance of Helen Lord & Joe Sable, once members of his unit, now private inquiry agents. The investigation is more perilous than any of them realise, and will have tragic consequences.
Unholy Murder by Lynda La Plante ($33, PB)
A coffin is dug up by builders in the grounds of an historic convent— inside is the body of a young nun. In a city as old as London, the discovery is hardly surprising. But when scratch marks are found on the inside of the coffin lid, Detective Jane Tennison believes she has unearthed a mystery far darker than any she’s investigated before. But her superiors dismiss it as an historic cold case, and the Church seems desperate to conceal the facts from the investigation. Tennison must pray she can uncover the truth before it’s buried forever.
Resistance: A Graphic Novel by Val McDermid (ill) Kathryn Briggs ($35, HB)
It’s the summer solstice weekend, and 150,000 people descend on a farm in the northeast of England for an open-air music festival. At first, a spot of rain seems to be the only thing dampening the fun— until a mystery bug appears. Before long, the illness is spreading at an electrifying speed and seems resistant to all antibiotics. Can journalist Zoe Meadows track the outbreak to its source, and will a cure be found before the disease becomes a pandemic?
The Inheritance by Gabriel Bergmoser ($30, PB)
Maggie is hiding out in a sleepy North QLD tourist town, trying to stay under the radar, when she stumbles across a dangerous drug cartel. Anyone else might back away, but Maggie is no ordinary girl. She’s got skills, as well as plenty of secrets to keep, burdens to carry—and anger to burn. When she has to get out of town fast she heads towards Melbourne, where she just might find the answers that she needs—answers about her family and who she really is. With a bent cop for a dubious ally, the police tracking her and furious bikers on her trail, Maggie is in deep trouble.
Northern Spy by Flynn Berry ($33, PB)
A producer at the Belfast bureau of the BBC, Tessa is at work one day when the news of another IRA raid comes on the air. As the anchor requests the public’s help in locating those responsible for this latest attack—a robbery at a gas station—Tessa’s sister appears on the screen pulling a black mask over her face. The police believe Marian has joined the IRA, but Tessa knows this is impossible. However, when the truth of what has happened to her sister reveals itself, Tessa will be forced to choose: between her ideals and her family.
The Devil’s Advocate by Steve Cavanagh ($33, PB)
They call him the King of Death Row. Randal Korn has sent more men to their deaths than any district attorney in the history of the United States. When a young woman, Skylar Edwards, is found murdered in Buckstown, Alabama, a corrupt sheriff arrests the last person to see her alive, Andy Dubois. It doesn’t seem to matter to anyone that Andy is innocent. Everyone in Buckstown believes Andy is guilty. He has no hope of a fair trial. And the local defense attorney assigned to represent him has disappeared. Hot shot New York lawyer Eddie Flynn travels south planning to destroy the prosecutor’s case, find the real killer and save Andy from the electric chair. But the murders are just beginning. Is Eddie Flynn next?
The Doll by Yrsa Sigurdardottir ($33, PB)
A quiet mother & daughter fishing trip—they catch nothing except a broken doll. The mother’s first instinct is to throw it back, but she relents when her daughter pleads to keep it. That evening, she posts a picture of the doll on social media. By the morning, she is dead & the doll has disappeared. Several years later and Detective Huldar is on a boat in rough waters, searching for possible human remains. However, identifying the skeleton they find on the seabed proves harder than initially thought, and Huldar must draw on psychologist Freyja’s experience to help him. Dead Money by Srinath Adiga ($30, PB) A stock market trader in Hong Kong desperate to pay off a fiftythree-million-dollar gangster debt. A mysterious suicide bomber in Mumbai under the spell of a dangerous myth. A banker in Amsterdam waging a lone battle to avert a global catastrophe. Three men whose disparate journeys are connected by a dizzying chain of causes and effects from Afterlife Dollars. A product based on Chinese mythology that promises happiness in the next world, yet has a devastating effect on this one. As the characters grapple with their individual moral dilemmas, their choices will affect the rest of humanity.
Rabbit Hole by Mark Billingham ($33, PB)
Alice is a police officer undercover in a psychiatric ward. They were meant to be safe on Fleet Ward: psychiatric patients monitored, treated, cared for. But one of their number has been found murdered. Was it a fellow patient? A member of staff? Or did someone come in from the outside? DC Alice Armitage is methodical, tireless, and she’s quickly on the trail of the killer. The only problem is, Alice is a patient too.
True Crime
Operation Jungle by John Shobbrook ($33, PB)
In the late 1970s, criminal mastermind John Milligan & his associates conspired to import heroin into Far North QLD via a remote mountain top airdrop. In a story that is stranger than fiction, it took them three trips through dense jungle to locate the heroin, but they only recovered one of the two packages. When narcotics agent John Shobbrook took on the investigation of this audacious crime, codenamed ‘Operation Jungle’, his career was on the rise within the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. What he discovered unwittingly set in motion a chain of events that not only destroyed his own career, but led to the disbanding of the Narcotics Bureau.
CSI Told You Lies: Giving victims a voice through forensics by Meshel Laurie ($35, PB)
The Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine (VIFM) is a world-renowned centre of forensic science, which has led major recovery operations from the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami to the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires to the shooting down of flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, plus high profile homicide cases, including the Frankston Serial Killer, the murders of Eurydice Dixon & Aya Maasarwe, and the arrest of convicted serial killer Peter Dupas. Meshel Laurie goes ‘behind the curtain’ at VIFM, interviewing the Institute’s roster of forensic experts about their daily work, plus homicide detectives, defence barristers & families of victims as they confront their darkest moments.
American Sherlock by Kate Winkler Dawson
Berkeley, California, 1933. In a lab filled with curiosities beakers, microscopes, Bunsen burners & hundreds of books— sat an investigator who would go on to crack at least 2,000 cases in his 40-year career. Known as the ‘American Sherlock Holmes’, Edward Oscar Heinrich was one of the greatest—and first—forensic scientists, with an uncanny knack for finding clues, establishing evidence & deducing answers with a skill that seemed almost supernatural. Kate Winkler Dawson captures the life of the man who spearheaded the invention of myriad new forensic tools, including blood-spatter analysis, ballistics, lie-detector tests & the use of fingerprints as courtroom evidence. ($23, PB)
Prison Break by Mark Dapin ($33, PB)
On a Sunday afternoon in 1980, armed robber Gregory David Roberts abseiled down the front wall of a maximum-security prison in broad daylight. He spent a decade on the run in West Asia before writing his own legend in the bestselling semi-autobiographical novel, Shantaram. In the late 90s, Melbournebased drug dealer & gangster David McMillan became the only Australian ever to escape from the so-called ‘Bangkok Hilton’ in Thailand. And in 1999, armed robber John Killick was airlifted out of a maximum-security prison by his beautiful Russian-born girlfriend—after she hijacked a helicopter with a machine gun. With unprecedented access to ex-prisoners, prison officers and police, as well as ASIO files and witnesses, Mark Dapin brings to life a hidden criminal world of prison brutality, courage and legend.
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