Defence attorney Mickey Haller has agreed to represent a woman who is in prison for killing her husband, a sheriff’s deputy, and Haller enlists his half-brother, retired LAPD Detective Harry Bosch, as investigator. Even after four years in prison, his new client maintains her innocence. Reviewing the case, Bosch sees something that doesn’t add up and senses the sheriff’s department close ranks as he pursues the truth.

If, like Kane, you’re a Denied Access Area spy for the CIA, then boundaries have no meaning. Your function is to go in, do whatever is required, and get out again – by whatever means necessary. You know when to run, when to hide – and when to shoot. But some places don’t play by the rules. Some places are too dangerous, even for a man of Kane’s experience. The badlands where the borders of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan meet are such a place – a place where violence is the only way to survive.

When the Australian Mystery Writers’ Society invited me to their crime-writing festival aboard the Ghan, the famous train between Darwin and Adelaide, I was hoping for some inspiration for my second book. Fiction, this time: I needed a break from real people killing each other. Obviously, that didn’t pan out.

It is 1929. The world is about to change. Finn Evans is a successful Boston banker harboring a secret that threatens to unravel his carefully constructed idyllic life. Isabelle Lazar, a young Ukrainian farmer, endures unspeakable hardships in her homeland as she fights to save her family from the Soviet Union’s iron grip. Barely escaping the Terror-Famine, she washes up alone on America’s distant shores.

There’s nothing quite so beautiful as Paris in the spring; and when you add in the chance to learn the French way of food, in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere, who can resist? Not Gabi Picabea or Kate Evans who have come from Australia to Sylvie Morel’s Paris Cooking School. Both are at a crossroads, and learning to cook the French way in Paris, far away from all their troubles, seems like the perfect escape.

A woman abandons her city life and marriage to return to the place of her childhood, holing up in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Monaro. She does not believe in God, doesn’t know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive life almost by accident. As she gradually adjusts to the rhythms of monastic life, she finds herself turning again and again to thoughts of her mother, whose early death she can’t forget.

Hera Stephen is clawing through her mid-twenties, working as an underpaid comment moderator in an overly air-conditioned newsroom by day and kicking around Sydney with her two best friends by night. Instead of money or stability, she has so far accrued one ex-girlfriend, several hundred hangovers and a dog-eared novel collection.

Tessa is a thoroughbred. A young, brilliant barrister from a working-class background now at the top of her game: defending, cross-examining and lighting up the shadows of doubt in any case. The law is a game and she is its most talented player. One sickening night, though, Tessa finds herself in a position countless women – one in three – have been in before her. And she’s faced with a gut-wrenching, life-changing decision. Will she take the stand to testify about her rape, with the full awareness that the system has not been built to protect her?

High-powered businesswoman Lana Rubicon has a lot to be proud of: her keen intelligence, impeccable taste, and the L.A. real estate empire she’s built. But when she finds herself trapped 300 miles north of the city, convalescing in a sleepy coastal town with her adult daughter Beth and teenage granddaughter Jack, Lana is stuck counting otters instead of square footage—and hoping that boredom won’t kill her before the cancer does.

All Hanna Fischer ever wanted to do was to study physics under the great Albert Einstein. But when, as a teenager in 1919, her life is suddenly turned upside-down, she is catapulted into a new and extraordinary life – as a secretary, a scientist, a sister and a spy. From racist gangs in Berlin to gangsters in New York City, Nazis in the 1930s and Hitler’s inner circle during the Second World War, Hanna will encounter some of history’s greatest minds and most terrible moments, all while desperately trying to stay alive.

For as long as they can remember, Jessica, Norah and Alicia have been told how lucky they are. Rescued from family tragedies and raised by a loving foster mother on an idyllic farming estate, they were given an elusive second chance of a happy family life. But their childhood wasn’t the fairy tale everyone thinks it was. And when a body is discovered under the home they grew up in, the foster sisters find themselves thrust into the spotlight as key witnesses. Or are they prime suspects?

A girl and her mother have been on the run for sixteen years, from police and the monster they left in their kitchen with a knife in his throat. They’ve found themselves a home inside a van with four flat tyres parked in a scrapyard by the edge of the Brisbane River.

Private Detective Cormoran Strike is contacted by a worried father whose son, Will, has gone to join a religious cult in the depths of the Norfolk countryside. The Universal Humanitarian Church is, on the surface, a peaceable organisation that campaigns for a better world. Yet Strike discovers that beneath the surface there are deeply sinister undertones, and unexplained deaths.

It is February 1942. Amid the turmoil of World War II, a group of Australian Army nurses, among them Nesta James and Vivian Bullwinkel, have just arrived in Singapore. The women have fled there from Malaya, where they had been stationed to care for Allied troops – and they are reluctant to move on again. Their hope is to remain in the beleaguered British colony to continue their mission of treating the sick and wounded.

At 27, Naomi is just trying to be a normal person. A normal person who works at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, who cares for lost things, found things, sacred things and her family. A person who finds herself going on bad blind dates, having cringe-worthy sex, a tumultuous, toxic affair, and falling for a man called Moses.

Gabe is alone at the cliff’s edge. His arms are outstretched, palms facing the empty air. He said she jumped. He wouldn’t lie. Before the woman went over the cliff, Pippa and Gabe were happy. They had the kind of marriage that everyone envies, as well as two sweet young daughters, a supportive family, and a picturesque cliff-side home – which would have been idyllic had the tall beachside cliffs not become so popular among those wishing to end their lives.

Gemma Guillory has lived in Rainier her entire life. She knows the tiny town’s ins and outs like the back of her hand, the people like they are her family, their quirks as if they were her own. She knows her once-charming town is now remembered for one reason, and one reason only. That three innocent people died. That the last stop on the Rainier Ripper’s trail of death seventeen years ago was her innocuous little teashop. She knows that the consequences of catching the Ripper still haunt her police officer husband and their marriage to this day and that some of her neighbours are desperate – desperate enough to welcome a dark tourism company keen to cash in on Rainier’s reputation as the murder town.

The untapped natural resources of Sweden’s far north are sparking a gold rush, with the criminal underworld leading the charge. But it’s not the prospect of riches that brings Lisbeth Salander to the small town of Gasskas. Her niece’s mother is the latest woman in the region to have vanished without trace. Two things soon become clear: Svala is a remarkably gifted teenager — and she’s being watched.

Things seem to be working out for Sophia in New York: having come from Australia to be at the centre of modernity, she’s working at the Museum of Modern Art, living in a great apartment with a boyfriend interviewing for Ivy League teaching positions. They’re smart, serious, dine in the right restaurants and have (a little unexpectedly) become engaged just before he leaves to hike the Appalachian Trail.

Adella is facing the dawn of a new year and the end of her twenties – and she’s in a psychiatric unit recovering from a mental breakdown. A decade earlier, her life held such promise; she had every option in her hand. How did it come to this?

When a tragic bushfire puts two kids in hospital, Indigenous teenager Andrew knows the police will come after him first. But Andrew almost wants to be caught, because at least it might make his dad come and rescue him from suburban Brisbane and his neglectful mother.
Growing up in small-town Tasmania, Andrew struggled at home, at school, at everything. The only thing that distracted or excited him was starting little fires. Flames boosted his morale and purified his thoughts, and they were the only thing in his life he could control. Until one day things got out of hand, and Andrew was forced to leave everything behind.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family’s orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

When Gordon arrives in Japan, he expects ruthless samurai, angry Japanese men ready to kill Australians at every corner. Instead, he finds Cherry, terrified of ex-enemy soldiers, a survivor of the atomic bomb. Against all the rules and all the odds, they fall in love. But when Gordon discovers the White Australia Policy prevents Cherry coming home with him as his war bride, he does what any 20-year-old soldier would do. He vows to fight. Leaving Cherry alone and pregnant in post-war Japan, Gordon has to convince his family to accept his marriage and wage a desperate campaign against a xenophobic and war-scarred government to allow his wife and children to come home.

Sydney, 1930: In a well-heeled corner of Paddington, just a short distance from the razor gangs of Darlinghurst and Kings Cross, sits La Maison des Fleurs, an upscale brothel run by the indomitable Madame. The star of La Maison is Violet Kelly – beautiful, clever and determined to make something of herself in a world that has already taken so much.

A year ago, LAPD detective Renée Ballard quit the force in the face of misogyny and endless red tape, but then took back her badge after being offered her dream job: building a new cold case unit. She makes Bosch an offer – if he works as a volunteer investigator for her, he can he can pick up the cold case that has haunted him for years, the murder of an entire family by a psychopath still walking free.

Captain Sannie van Rensburg and safari guide Mia Greenaway are caught in the crossfire of a decades-old feud between five veterans of South Africa’s apartheid-era Border War. Haunted by the deadly mission that shaped their lives forever, the ex-paratroopers must finally confront their demons, and each other, at the funeral of a comrade in the red dunes of the Kalahari Desert.

For over fifty years Egypt has known nothing but war and devastation at the hands of the Hyksos, a bloodthirsty barbarian people from the distant east who continue to advance, crushing armies in their wake. Times are desperate, but throughout the conflict, a brave resistance fights on under the great Taita, a slave who has risen far beyond his ranks.

It’s 1679 and into the tumult, politics and colour of Restoration London and its lively theatre scene comes the fierce and opinionated Tribulation Johnson. Cast out from her family as ungodly and unworthy, Tribulation is determined to forge her own remarkable path. Arriving in London, Tribulation is astonished to discover that the widowed cousin she’s been sent to live with is none other than the most infamous woman in London: the former spy and traitor’s mistress, the playwright and polemical poetess, Aphra Behn.

Alison is an actress who no longer acts, Patrick a musician past his prime. The eccentric couple live an isolated, debauched existence in an old manor house in Scotland, a few miles outside their village. That is, until Patrick’s teenage daughter, Neve, flees Australia to spend a year abroad with her doting, if unreliable, father, and the stepmother she barely knows.

El O’Reilly is exceptionally good at making mistakes. But when Mace proposes to someone else, El’s world finally breaks. Will she go back to the safe love she’s always known, will Mace realise that she’s the one, or will El forge her own path into the unknown?

Old loyalties and decades-long feuds rise to the surface in this stunning crime novel, set in a spectacular Australian landscape known for its jagged cliffs and hidden caves. Detective Sergeant Mark Ariti has taken a few days’ holiday in Broken Bay at precisely the wrong time. The small fishing town on South Australia’s Limestone Coast is now the scene of a terrible tragedy.

White lies – When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steals her unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own under the ambiguous name Juniper Song. Dark humour – But as evidence threatens June’s stolen success, she will discover exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves. Deadly consequences… What happens next is entirely everyone else’s fault.

Only a handful of inmates in Westmead Prison have committed crimes so atrocious that they’ve been locked away for life, and for fifteen years, convicted murderer Tomas Kovak has refused to disclose where he hid the body of his victim, a vulnerable young woman. When Kovak is diagnosed with terminal cancer, intense pressure is put on Dr Laura Fleming, criminal psychologist, to find the location of Kovak’s victim so her grieving family can find some sort of closure.

1914, Fiji: Akal Singh, 25, would rather be anywhere but this tropical paradise – or, as he calls it, ‘this godforsaken island’. After a promising start to his police career in Hong Kong, Akal has been sent to the farflung colony of Fiji as punishment for a humiliating professional mistake. Lonely and grumpy, Akal plods through his work and dreams of a return to Hong Kong, or even his native India.

Layla Byrnes is exhausted. She’s juggling a demanding job as an anaesthetist, a disintegrating marriage, her young kids, and a needy lover. And most particularly she’s managing her histrionically unstable mother, who repeatedly threatens to kill herself. But this year, it’s different. When her mother rings just before Christmas, she doesn’t follow the usual script. Instead, she tells Layla that there’s something she needs to tell her about her much-loved father.

A young girl loses both her parents in a tragic event, and is taken to live with her grandmother on a flower farm. Growing up, Alice learns the language of Australian native flowers as a way to say the things that are too hard to speak. But she also learns that there are secrets within secrets about her past. An unexpected betrayal leaves her reeling, and she escapes to try to make her own – sometimes painful – way through the world, and to find her story.

Adam Bowman, a battling journalist who grew up as the son of a teacher at Prince Albert College, might be the only person who can uncover the links between the school murder and the ‘Blue Moon Killer’. But he will have to go into the darkest places of his childhood to piece together the clues. Detective Sergeant Rose Riley, meanwhile, is part of the taskforce desperately trying to find the killer before he strikes again. Adam Bowman’s excavation of his past might turn out to be Rose’s biggest trump card or it may bring the whole investigation crashing down, and put her own life in danger.

Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But when Charlie is seventeen, he meets a dog named Radar and her aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed in the backyard. When Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie a cassette tape telling a story no one would believe – inside the shed is a portal to another world.

It is an ordinary Thursday and things should finally be returning to normal. Except trouble is never far away where the Thursday Murder Club is concerned. A decade-old cold case leads them to a local news legend and a murder with no body and no answers.

In her work as a ‘death doula’, Clover Brooks ushers people peacefully through their last days, collecting their final words into three notebooks: ADVICE, CONFESSIONS and REGRETS. But Clover spends so much time with the dying that she’s forgotten how to live.. Can her clients’ hard-won wisdom – and the inspiring love story of a spirited old woman named Claudia – show Clover the way to a happy ending?

After fleeing to Melbourne in the wake of a breakup, all Ana has to show for herself is an unfulfilling job at an overly enthusiastic tech start-up and one particularly questionable dating app experience. Then she meets Evan. Charming, kind and financially responsible, Evan is a complete aberration from her usual type, and Ana feels like she has finally awoken from a long dating nightmare.

When Primrose makes an unplanned detour into a dilapidated suburban golf course called Whistles, she has no idea that the past will come rushing back at her, bringing every detail of her life into stark focus. At 36, her marriage is teetering from illness and infidelity. A visit from her commanding brother-in-law looms ominously on the horizon. And by a twist of fate, Peter, the boy she loved twenty years ago, is now living across the street.

The first drops start to fall when Quinn spies the body. With no reception and nothing but an empty road for miles, does she stop to help or keep driving to safety? Back at the iconic country pub where Quinn works, Andrea is sandbagging the place in preparation for heavy rains. Alone with her sleeping son in the back room, she reluctantly lets a biker in to wait out the storm.

Citizens of the main island enjoy privileged lives, attended to by the support staff who live on a cramped neighbouring island, where whispers begin to grow into cries for revolution. Meanwhile, life for Prosperans is perfection – and when it’s not, their bodies are sent to the mysterious third island: a facility named The Nursery, to be rebooted and restart life afresh.

Parents behaving badly . . . a tragic accident . . . or murder? What isn’t in doubt is that someone is dead. Madeline is a force to be reckoned with: witty, noisy and passionate. She remembers everything and forgives no one. Celeste is the kind of beautiful woman who makes the world stop and stare. But perfection is often an illusion. Jane is a single mum with a mysterious past who carries a sadness beyond her years. These three women, all with children starting at the same school, are about to tell the little lies that can turn lethal.

In 1914, when the war draws the young men of Britain away to fight, it is the women who must keep the nation running. Two of those women are Peggy and Maude, twin sisters who work in the bindery at Oxford University Press in Jericho. Peggy is intelligent, ambitious and dreams of studying at Oxford University, but for most of her life she has been told her job is to bind the books, not read them. Maude, meanwhile, wants nothing more than what she has. She is extraordinary but vulnerable. Peggy needs to watch over her.

Maxine ‘Max’ Mayberry, an ad executive with writing ambitions, is holed up in a friend’s apartment after discovering her long-term boyfriend in bed with another woman. If that wasn’t bad enough, Max has recently been diagnosed with a brain tumour. Enter Johnny: a cheeky yet charming Tinder pen pal and the perfect distraction. Together, Max and Johnny flirt and cook their way through The Laurent Family Cookbook (a recipe book from Max’s ex-boyfriend’s pretentious French family) without ever meeting in person.

Four generations of women experience love, loss, war and hope from the rise of Nazism to the Cuban Revolution and, finally, the fall of the Berlin Wall in this sweeping novel from the internationally bestselling author of The German Girl.

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.

At the end of a scorching hot day, beside a creek in the grounds of a grand country house, a local man makes a terrible discovery. Police are called, and the small town of Tambilla becomes embroiled in one of the most baffling murder investigations in the history of South Australia. Many years later and thousands of miles away, Jess is a journalist in search of a story. Having lived and worked in London for nearly two decades, she now finds herself unemployed and struggling to make ends meet. A phone call summons her back to Sydney, where her beloved grandmother, Nora, who raised Jess when her mother could not, has suffered a fall and is seriously ill in hospital.

Everybody knows Daisy Jones and the Six. From the moment Daisy walked barefoot on to the stage at the Whisky, she and the band were a sensation. Their sound defined an era. Their albums were on every turntable. They played sold-out arenas from coast to coast. Then, on 12 July 1979, it all came crashing down.

The health and wellness retreat promises total transformation, and nine stressed city dwellers are keen to drop their literal and mental baggage, while enjoying their hot stone massages in complete serenity.

A heavily-armed counter-assault team, sedatives strong enough for large animals, a hood, mouthguard and Secret Service Agents asking for selfies. Not your average meeting with the President. But Orphan X is not your average guest. The last survivor of the off-the-books Orphan programme, Evan was trained to do his government’s dirty work. Until he escaped.

Charlie Wynwood and Silas Nash have been best friends since they could walk. They’ve been in love since the age of fourteen. But as of this morning… they are complete strangers. Their first kiss, their first fight, the moment they fell in love… every memory has vanished.

Detective Jillian Basset is just back from maternity leave, struggling with new motherhood as she tackles the biggest case of her career. As her work and home lives get messier and messier, though, something’s going to give.

Beyah Grim has only ever known a life of poverty and neglect. After surviving by any means necessary, she finally has a hard-earned ticket out of Kentucky with a full ride to Penn State. Two short months before she’s finally free, an unexpected death leaves her homeless and forced to spend the remainder of her summer on a peninsula in Texas with a father she barely knows.

On his daily commute on the 6:20am train to Manhattan thirty-two year old Travis sees the
lavish houses of the wealthy, dreaming to join their ranks. Then one morning his dull routine is
shattered by an anonymous email. His friend is dead, prompting the NYPD to come calling. Before
the day is out another ominous visit threatens to dredge up grim secrets from his past in the army
unless he participates in a clandestine investigation into his firm.

On a hilltop in Umbria sits Valetto. Once a thriving village-and a hub of resistance and refuge during World War II-centuries of earthquakes, landslides and the lure of a better life have left it neglected. Only ten residents remain, including the widows Serafino – three eccentric sisters and their steely centenarian mother – who live quietly in their medieval villa. Then their nephew and grandson, Hugh, a historian, returns.

On a cool autumn morning, Victoria Nash heads into her village pulling a rickety wagon filled with late-season peaches. As she nears an intersection, a stranger in town stops to ask her the way. She makes the decision to walk with him. ‘Go as a river,’ he tells her as they part ways.

Five attendees are selected for a month-long writing retreat at the remote estate of Roza Vallo, the controversial high priestess of feminist horror. Alex, a struggling writer, is thrilled. Upon arrival, they discover they must complete an entire novel from scratch, and the best one will receive a seven-figure publishing deal. Alex’s long-extinguished dream now seems within reach. But then the women begin to die.

Weaving together the stories of three women across five centuries, Weyward is an enthralling novel of female resilience and the transformative power of the natural world.

Forbidden, passionate and all-encompassing, Margo and Richard’s love affair was the stuff of legend– but, ultimately, doomed. When Richard walked out, Margo locked herself away, leaving her three daughters, Rachel, Imogen and Sasha, to run wild.

Fleeing problems in her own marriage, child protection worker Dana Gibson leaves Sydney for a job in the Queensland town of Toowoomba. Her first house call is to nearby Crows Nest to assess the children of Sandra Kirby, which results in her getting both her new boss and a local detective offside. Dana soon learns that, in the country, city rules do not apply.

A brutal attack. An agent on the run. Private Beijing is left devastated after an attack sees its lead agent, Lee Sheung, captured. With Private now under scrutiny by the Beijing police, Sheung’s second-in-command calls on Jack Morgan, global head of the world’s finest PI agency, to investigate.

A top secret F117 aircraft crashes into the Nevada desert. The Nighthawk is the most advanced fighting machine in the world and the Soviets will do anything to get their hands on its secrets.

Gavin Jones is dead at thirty-nine. As an in-house lawyer who controlled millions of dollars in fees per year, he was legal firm Howard Greene’s biggest client and wielded that power with manipulative contempt. But he saved his worst behaviour for women, at work and at home.

One hot summer day, stuck in traffic on her way to pick up the cake for her daughter’s sixteenth birthday party, Grace Adams snaps. She doesn’t scream or break something or cry or curl into a ball. She simply abandons her car in traffic and walks away. But not from her life – towards it. Towards the daughter who has banned her from the party. Towards the husband divorcing her. Towards the terrible thing that has blown their family apart.

One foggy morning on the banks of the Murray River, a body is found in a burnt-out area of grassland. The heavily tattooed victim, who has suffered two bullet wounds to the head, is identified as Freddie Jones, a bikie from Moama. Detective Sergeant Zoe Mayer is on the case, alongside her trusty service dog, Harry. Although Zoe is determined to track down the murderer, she finds herself stonewalled at every turn-by Freddie’s family, his associates and even the local police. But then a second body is discovered, and soon all bets are off.

The drowning town holds a secret that someone is prepared to murder for, and as the floodwaters cut Gloster off from the world the three young police officers begin to understand that it’s not just them left stranded. Somewhere out there in the floodwaters is a killer. And he needs them dead.

Gary Thorn goes for a pint with a work acquaintance called Brendan. When Brendan leaves early, Gary meets a girl in the pub. He doesn’t catch her name, but falls for her anyway. When she suddenly disappears without saying goodbye, all Gary has to remember her by is the book she was reading: The Satsuma Complex. But when Brendan goes missing, Gary needs to track down the girl he now calls Satsuma to get some answers.

It started with the Hemsworths. Now, Byron Bay local, Aimee Maguire, is about to lose everything because she can’t afford to pay the rent. Her engagement is also on an official time-out since her fiancé doesn’t know what he wants. The last thing she needs is a surprise visit from her micro-influencer niece looking to ‘build her brand’.

A funny, moving, brilliantly observed story about letting go of the past. When multi-millionaire Jacki Turner is forced to take stock of her life, she sets her daughters a challenge – in order to inherit her vast fortune, each must fulfil a task that she believes will push them to become better versions of themselves.

After a humiliating public scandal, Olivia is hiding from the press in a remote Tasmanian house when an unknown man knocks on her door, seeking Pippa, a woman who once lived there. His father, Jeremy, has died, leaving behind a letter for this mysterious woman. Olivia wants to help, but can she risk revealing her own sordid past?

With plans for a new mosque and the resettlement of refugees in the retirement village, Copeton becomes a breeding ground for Islamophobia. Together with the other members of the group, this small band of fibre-arts enthusiasts battle racism and bigotry with colour and creativity, but will the fragile threads of community be enough to bind them when more than one member has something to hide?

Before the woman went over the cliff, Pippa and Gabe were happy. They had the kind of marriage that everyone envies, as well as two sweet young daughters, a supportive family, and a picturesque cliff-side home – which would have been idyllic had the tall beachside cliffs not become so popular among those wishing to end their lives.

When he decides to tag along with his brother Rodrick’s band, Löded Diper, Greg doesn’t realize what he’s getting into. But he soon learns that late nights, unpaid gigs, fighting between band members, and money troubles are all part of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle.

A year has passed since LAPD detective Renée Ballard quit the force in the face of misogyny, demoralisation and endless red tape. Yet after the chief of police himself tells her she can write her ticket within the department, Ballard takes back her badge, leaving ‘the Late Show’ to rebuild the cold case unit at the elite Robbery-Homicide Division.

For most of the last hundred years, Biloxi was known for its beaches, resorts, and seafood industry. But it had a darker side. It was also notorious for corruption and vice, everything from gambling, prostitution, bootleg liquor, drugs . . . even contract killings. The vice was controlled by a small cabal of mobsters, many of them rumoured to be members of the Dixie Mafia.

Gerrardsville, Colorado. One tragic event. Two witnesses. Two conflicting accounts. One witness sees a woman throw herself in front of a bus – clearly suicide. The other witness is Jack Reacher. And he sees what really happened – a man in grey hoodie and jeans, swift and silent as a shadow, pushed the victim to her death, before grabbing her bag and sauntering away.

The last time Esther Wilding’s beloved older sister Aura was seen, she was walking along the shore towards the sea. In the wake of Aura’s disappearance, Esther’s family struggles to live with their loss. To seek the truth about her sister’s death, Esther reluctantly travels from lutruwita, Tasmania to Copenhagen, and then to the Faroe Islands, following the trail of the stories Aura left behind: seven fairy tales about selkies, swans and women, alongside cryptic verses Aura wrote and had secretly tattooed on her body.

Memory man FBI agent, Amos Decker, returns in this action-packed thriller to investigate the mysterious and brutal murder of a federal judge and her bodyguard at her home in an exclusive, gated community in Florida.

Olivia McAfee and Ava Campanello have each had a change of life forced upon them. Olivia never dreamed that after her messy divorce she would find herself back in her sleepy New Hampshire home town, living in the house she grew up in and taking over her father’s beekeeping business. Ava is also in search of a fresh start, moving to Adams with her daughter Lily, who is in her final year of high school.

At a busy festival site on a warm spring night, a baby lies alone in her pram, her mother vanishing into the crowds.

Michaela and Eve are two bright, bold women who befriend each other their first year at a residential college at university, where they live in adjacent rooms. They could not be more different; one assured and popular – the other uncertain and eager-to-please. But something happens one night in O-week – a drunken encounter, a foggy memory that will force them to confront the realities of consent and wrestle with the dynamics of power.

There were a dozen witnesses to Denny Tran’s brutal murder in a busy Sydney restaurant. So how come no one saw anything?

Carla is a young doctor striving to become the first female surgeon at a prestigious Melbourne hospital. When a consultant post opens up, she competes with her lover for the job and thinks she can be judged on merit. But an assault after a boozy workplace dinner leaves her traumatised and struggling to cope with the misogyny coming from every corner of her workplace. Recovering her fragmented memories from that night, Carla begins a fight for justice that will shake the foundations of the hospital she loves.

Melbourne, 1930, as the Great Depression is taking hold: Thirteen-year-old Morris Turner, a little anxious by nature, feels more at home gazing at the stars than spending time with his detached father Jude, a detective, and older sister, Lottie. When a young woman is murdered in Jude’s home town of Gemini, he is assigned to solve the case. With fear and polio rising in the city, Jude reluctantly takes Morris and Lottie to the small town he left long ago.

Fifty years ago, a group of teenagers spent a weekend on Holy Island, forging a bond that has lasted a lifetime. Now, they still return every five years to celebrate their friendship, and remember the friend they lost to the rising waters of the causeway at the first reunion.

For 35 years, the United States and Russia each had their own superhero. Three days ago, America’s hero died. Today will be bad. In the face of an overwhelming attack, one young woman – unassuming and anonymous – might be America’s only hope. Her codename… COBALT BLUE

Anja is a young, ambitious antiquarian, passionate for the clean and balanced lines of mid-century furniture. She is intent on classifying objects based on emotional response and when her career goes awry, Anja finds herself adrift. Like a close friend, she confesses her intimacies and rage to us with candour, tenderness, and humour.

When a Navy vessel comes across a yacht in distress in the middle of the vast Indian Ocean, Captain Danial Tengku orders his ship to rush to its aid. On board the yacht is a British couple: a horribly injured man, Jake, and his traumatized wife, Virginie, who breathlessly confesses, “It’s all my fault. I killed them.”

With her ex soon to be married, her mum back on the dating scene, and her best friend threatening to settle down with the Most Boring Man Alive, Stevie is feeling left behind.

Gilda cannot stop thinking about death. Desperate for relief from her anxious mind and alienated from her repressive family, she responds to a flyer for free therapy at a local church and finds herself abruptly hired to replace the deceased receptionist Grace. It’s not the most obvious job – she’s queer and an atheist for starters – and so in between trying to learn mass, hiding her new maybe-girlfriend and conducting an amateur investigation into Grace’s death, Gilda must avoid revealing the truth of her mortifying existence.

Legendary spy and art restorer Gabriel Allon has at long last severed ties with Israeli intelligence and settled quietly with his beautiful wife and their young twins in Venice, the only place he has ever truly known peace.

When three teenagers stumble upon a body in dense bushland one rainy Friday night, Senior Sergeant Mark Ariti’s hopes for a quiet posting in his old home town are shattered. The victim is Aidan Sleeth, a property developer, whose controversial plan to buy up local land means few are surprised he ended up dead.

Longbill Beach, 1982. Emily Vaughn gets ready for prom night, the highlight of any high school experience. But Emily has a secret. And by the end of the evening, she will be dead.

Twenty years ago, Cyrus Haven’s family was murdered. Only he and his brother survived. Cyrus because he hid. Elias because he was the killer.

For years, rumours of the ‘Marsh Girl’ have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say.

Having survived combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq and been decorated with medals, Travis Devine mysteriously leaves the Army under a cloud of suspicion. And at thirty-two years old, he’s swapping fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda for a different kind of danger in the cut-throat world of high finance.

Callum Haffenden swore he’d never return to Granite Creek. But, thirty years after a life-shattering accident, he’s thrust back into the clutches of Far North Queensland and a local legend he worked hard to forget.

Queensland in 1976 churns with corruption. When Detective Ray Windsor defies it, he is exiled deep into the state’s west. It’s easy out there to feel alien in your own country.

Dedicated and ambitious, Emma Swann is about to start a gruelling year as a surgical registrar at the prestigious Mount teaching hospital. She’s excited to join her adored older brother Andy in pursuing the same career as their father, an eminent surgeon who made his name at The Mount.

Three siblings, reunited in their home town, are struggling to deal with the fallout of a car crash that almost killed their father. This, on top of everything else life is throwing at them.

From postwar Paris to Australia to find love, fashion and freedom. One woman’s quest to follow her head, and her heart.

Meet Daphne Buckley, a psychiatrist in search of a great love. He hasn’t turned up yet. But surely he will. He could be any one of the respondents to her old-fashioned ‘looking for love’ classifieds. He could be one of the men her overbearing mother tries to set her up with, or even someone she already knows.

From the outside, the Delaneys appear to be an enviably contented family. Now that Joy and Stan have sold the family business they have all the time in the world to learn how to ‘relax’. Their four adult children are busy living their own lives, and while it could be argued they never quite achieved their destinies, no-one ever says that out loud.

When prison psychologist Dr Laura Fleming is assigned charismatic inmate Justin Jones to assess for parole, alarm bells ring. Working with some of the state’s most damaged criminals, she knows Jones is too dangerous to release, but he’s got everyone fooled . . . She needs proof.

As she approached the age of seventy, Ruth Wilson began to have recurring dreams about losing her voice. Unable to dismiss her feelings of unexplainable sadness, she made the radical decision to retreat from her conventional life with her husband to a sunshine-yellow cottage in the Southern Highlands where she lived alone for the next decade.

When Melbourne lawyer Nathan Smithson takes on the case of mad, wealthy Edward Fonçeca’s inheritance trial against his ruthless brother in 1902, he must unearth long-buried family secrets to have any chance of winning.

The small town of Nannine lies in the harsh red interior of New South Wales. Once a thriving outback centre, years of punishing drought have whittled it down to no more than a couple of pubs and a police station. And its one sinister claim to fame: the still-unsolved disappearance of Evelyn McCreery nineteen years ago from the bedroom she shared with her twin sister.

Sarah Calhoun is a regular Sydney soccer mum, but she’s keeping terrifying secrets from everyone she loves . . . and her past is about to catch up with her. When two men from Northern Ireland hunt her down, she’s forced to return to Belfast to testify at a murder trial. Caught in the crossfire of an obsessive policeman driven by a disturbing past, and a brutal IRA executioner, Sarah faces an impossible choice.

Penny can’t help but compare herself to her friends. Annie is about to become a senior associate at her law firm, Bec has just got engaged, Leo is dating everyone this side of the Yarra, and Penny is just … waiting. Waiting for Max, her on-again, off-again boyfriend, to allow her to spend the night, waiting for the promotion she was promised, waiting for her Valium to kick in. Waiting for her real life to start.

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house.

From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans.

Junius is the patriarch, a celebrated Shakespearean actor who fled bigamy charges in England, both a mesmerising talent and a man of terrifying instability. As his children grow up in a remote farmstead in 1830s rural Baltimore, the country draws ever closer to the boiling point of secession and civil war.

As the pearling ships return to Bannin Bay after a long diving season, twenty-year-old Eliza Brightwell nervously awaits the arrival of her father’s boat.

But when his lugger finally limps in, it brings with it a tale of tragedy: Charles Brightwell, master pearler, has gone missing at sea.

One little camper went to the fireside. One little camper stood alone. One did a dreadful thing, and made sure another never made it back home.

In Northern New South Wales, heavily pregnant and a week away from maternity leave, Detective Sergeant Kate Miles is exhausted and counting down the days. But a violent hold-up at a local fast-food restaurant with unsettling connections to her own past, means that her final days will be anything but straightforward.

Back in the long ago nineties, Rachel Walsh was a mess.

But a spell in rehab transformed everything. Life became very good, very quickly. These days, Rachel has love, family, a great job as an addiction counsellor, she even gardens. Her only bad habit is a fondness for expensive trainers.

But with the sudden reappearance of a man she’d once loved, her life wobbles.

Bryce Quinlan and Hunt Athalar have made a pact. As they process the events of the Spring they will keep things … platonic … until the Solstice. But can they resist when the crackling tension between them is enough to set the whole of Crescent City aflame?

Texas, 1934. Elsa Martinelli had finally found the life she’d yearned for. A family, a home and a livelihood on a farm on the Great Plains. But when drought threatens all she and her community hold dear, Elsa’s world is shattered to the winds. Fearful of the future, when Elsa wakes to find her husband has fled, she is forced to make the most agonizing decision of her life. Fight for the land she loves or take her beloved children, Loreda and Ant, west to California in search of a better life.

In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much
older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist’s damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him-and solve the mystery of her husband’s disappearances.