New Books / Reviews
Reviews of New Books Spring 2025
Following weeks of heavy rain, the earth comes crumbling down on one of Larvik’s residential areas, burying a handful of houses.
Detective William Wisting is quick to join the rescue operation. Luckily, by sunrise the next day, it becomes clear that the landslide has claimed no victims. And yet, just twenty-four hours later, a body is found and the victim was killed before the landslide. As Wisting opens an investigation into the mysterious murder, he soon discovers this death might have dangerous ties to a series of ongoing cases. The clues start leading Wisting not towards an enemy on the outside, but to a traitor in his own unit.
Fred Cahir tells the story about the magnitude of Aboriginal involvement on the Victorian goldfields in the middle of the nineteenth century. The first history of Aboriginal–white interaction on the Victorian goldfields, Black Gold offers new insights on one of the great epochs in Australian and world history, the gold story.
In vivid detail it describes how Aboriginal people often figured significantly in the search for gold and documents the devastating social impact of gold mining on Victorian Aboriginal communities. It reveals the complexity of their involvement from passive presence, to active discovery, to shunning the goldfields.
The last person Alice Shipley expected to see when she arrived in Tangier with her new husband was Lucy Mason.
After the horrific accident at Bennington, the two friends, once inseparable roommates, haven’t spoken in over a year. But Lucy is standing there, trying to make things right. Perhaps Alice should be happy. She has not adjusted to life in Morocco, too afraid to venture out into the bustling medinas and oppressive heat. Lucy, always fearless and independent, helps Alice emerge from her flat and explore the country. But soon a familiar feeling starts to overtake Alice – she feels controlled and stifled by Lucy at every turn. Then Alice’s husband, John, goes missing, and she starts to question everything around her.
When a woman goes missing, it gets personal for DCI Craig Gillard. But he could never imagine what happens next.
Criminologist Martin Knight lives a gilded life and is a thorn in the side of the police. But then his wife Liz goes missing. There is no good explanation and no sign of Martin. To make things worse, Liz is the ex-girlfriend of DCI Craig Gillard who is drawn into the investigation. Is it just a missing person or something worse? And what relevance do the events around the shocking Girl F case, so taken up by Knight, have to do with the present?
As NY Lt. Eve Dallas and her billionaire husband Roarke are driving home, a young woman, dazed, naked, and bloody, suddenly stumbles out in front of their car.
Roarke slams on the brakes and Eve springs into action. Daphne Strazza is rushed to the ER, but it’s too late for her husband Dr. Anthony Strazza. A brilliant orthopaedic surgeon, he now lies dead amid the wreckage of his obsessively organized town house, his three safes opened and emptied. Daphne would be a valuable witness, but in her terror and shock the only description of the perp she can offer is repeatedly calling him “the devil”.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell has been “exiled” to a low-key post policing rustic Catalina Island, after department politics drove him off a homicide desk on the mainland.
While following up the usual drunk-and-disorderlies and petty thefts that come with his new territory, Detective Stilwell gets a report of a body found weighed down at the bottom of the harbour, a Jane Doe identifiable at first only by a streak of purple dye in her hair. At the same time, a report of poaching on a protected reserve turns into a case fraught with violence and danger as Stilwell digs into the shady past of an island bigwig.
When the redoubtable Miss Phryne Fisher receives threatening letters at her home, she enlists the unflappable apprentice Tinker to investigate. But as the harassment of Phryne threatens to spin out of control, her lover, Lin Chung is also targeted.
Meanwhile, Dot begins to fear that her fiancée, newly promoted Sergeant Hugh Collins, has gone cold on setting a date for their wedding. Phryne’s clever daughters, Ruth and Jane, begin their own investigation into suspiciously dwindling funds when they are sent to help at the Blind Institute.
None of this is quite enough to prevent Phryne from accepting an invitation to a magnificent party at the house of the mysterious Hong. When the party is interrupted by shocking tragedy, Phryne gathers all of her unerring brilliance to track down the miscreants. With some unlikely assistance, Phryne is in a race against time to save a pair of young lovers from disgrace and death.
The changing seasons captivated Vincent van Gogh (1853-90), who saw in their unending cycle the majesty of nature and the existence of a higher force. Van Gogh and the Seasons is the first book to explore this central aspect of van Gogh’s life and work.
Van Gogh often linked the seasons to rural life and labour as men and women worked the land throughout the year. From his depictions of peasants and sowers to winter gardens, riverbanks, orchards, and harvests, he painted scenes that richly evoke the sensory pleasures and deprivations particular to each season.
In the blink of an eye everything changes. Seventeen year-old Mia has no memory of the accident; she can only recall what happened afterwards, watching her own damaged body being taken from the wreck.
Little by little she struggles to put together the pieces, to figure out what she has lost, what she has left, and the very difficult choice she must make.
“Provides project designs and complete directions for building 24 innovative metal-work projects. Features the latest in welding equipment and techniques, and offers projects that are both practical and ornamental”–Provided by publisher.
Hazel’s new job at the docks quickly turns perilous when she stumbles into the criminal underworld that lurks beneath the surface.
A million in gold coins has vanished from a cargo ship and a dead body washed up. Suddenly, she’s in over her head. Disillusioned with her life, Betty is led astray by a charismatic new friend and finds herself exposed in more ways than one until a crisis drags her back to reality.
Living in a high-class brothel, Irene gets wind of a threat that could destroy her livelihood. She takes on the Maltese mafia and becomes involved in a dangerously sticky situation. When one of the tea ladies disappears, they face their greatest challenge yet, pushing their detective skills to the limit. It will take more than a glass of Hazel’s homemade wine to solve this one.
‘We were four shattered souls saying goodbye that night.’
That same night a storm raged as Helena drove through sheets of rain back to Melbourne, to the hospital, willing Maria to delay her last breath. In her follow up to the award-nominated When the Past Awakens, Helena Kidd recounts the final days of her mother, Maria Avraam. Maria came to Australia from Cyprus in 1957. She was a survivor of an abusive marriage and was later deserted in the 1960s. With the assistance of her children, she became a first-time homeowner at the age of 64 in Brunswick, Victoria. Called ‘The Quiet House’, it gave Maria new life and set her free from cultural patterns of restriction.
Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life: when she was eleven and her mother disappeared, being proposed to at twenty-one, the accident that would make her a widow at forty-one.
At each of these moments, Willa ended up on a path laid out for her by others. So, when she receives a phone call telling her that her son’s ex-girlfriend has been shot and needs her help, she drops everything and flies across the country. The spur-of-the-moment decision to look after this woman and her nine-year-old daughter and her dog, will lead Willa into uncharted territory. Surrounded by new and surprising neighbours, she is plunged into the rituals that make a community and takes pleasure in the most unexpected things.
Madeleine d’Leon doesn’t know where Edward came from. He is simply a character in her next book.
But as she writes, he becomes all she can think about. His charm, his dark hair, his pen scratching out his latest literary novel. Edward McGinnity can’t get Madeleine out of his mind, softly smiling, infectiously enthusiastic, and perfectly damaged. She will be the ideal heroine for his next book. But who is the author and who is the creation? And as the lines start to blur, who is affected when a killer finally takes flesh?
Among the most popular attractions at The Cloisters, the medieval branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, is a set of tapestries depicting the hunt of the fabled unicorn.
Each of the seven exquisite tapestries is reproduced in large colour plates and with a wealth of colour details. Created in the Netherlands in 1495-1505, they contain supremely memorable images – from the vulnerable unicorn and the individualized faces of the hunters to the naturalistically depicted flora and fauna. The author also looks at the construction of the tapestries and the historical and cultural context in which they were woven.
Ghost Cities – inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China – follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn’t speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work. How is his relocation to one such ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed then re-created, page by page and book by book, all in the name of love and art? Allegorical and imaginative, Ghost Cities will appeal to readers of Haruki Murakami and Italo Calvino.
Deep Listening to Nature is an invitation to open our ears to the natural world. Beginning by tuning in to the sounds of creatures around us, Andrew discusses how to identify species by call, interpret their communications and find empathy for their sentience. Part reflection, part nature and travel diary, Andrew asks what does listening reveal about how the living systems of nature function, and why do birds in particular negotiate their interactions in such lyrical and extraordinary ways? He concludes by suggesting we not only listen to learn about nature, but learn from nature. He asks how, in our current environmental crisis, we may mimic what the biosphere has achieved in sustaining life as we move toward an ecological future and in doing so, form a deeper and more personal connection to Country. Andrew encourages us to be still and listen. Extend our senses. Let nature get to know us, and in its own way, to welcome us. The book is accompanied by an online soundtrack with 300 audio recordings, which bring the text to life.