Reviewed

With girlfriend DS Jacquie Carpenter back at work and little baby Nolan rapidly growing into a feisty toddler, Peter 'Mad Max' Maxwell, Head of Sixth Form at Leighford High, decides to hire an au pair. The exotic Juanita Reyes hails from the sun-drenched isle of Menorca, and whilst the good...Read more

Just where is justice in Australia hiding? This brilliant new collection of true crime stories takes us into the Australian courts of the 1980s and '90s, back in time to the goldfields of the 1860's, and out to the island nation of Nauru in 2006 to explore how the scales of justice are...Read more

In January 2000, news headlines declared that Dr. Harold Shipman had been found guilty of murdering 15 of his patients. Before the trial, many assumed Shipman was an over-zealous doctor who went too far in providing comfort to dying patients. This was not the case. Shipman had deliberately...Read more

At first the prisoner scratches at the walls until her fingers bleed. But there is no escaping the room. With no way of measuring time, her days, weeks, months go unrecorded. She vows not go mad. She will not give her captors the satisfaction. She will die first. 

Copenhagen...Read more

Peking in 1937 is a heady mix of privilege and scandal, opulence and opium dens, rumors and superstition. The Japanese are encircling the city, and the discovery of Pamela Werner's body sends a shiver through already nervous Peking. Is it the work of a madman? One of the ruthless Japanese...Read more

Straddling old world and new, Mila and the Bone Man explores the corrosive power of guilt, the solace to be found in the natural world, and our capacity to heal as well as hurt.

Set in the forest in northern New Zealand, Mila is a young woman descended from healers. A family...Read more

Author Shirley Eldridge and Mima Joan McKim-Hill were friends and colleagues working for the Capricornia Regional Electricity Board in Rockhampton in 1967 when Mima disappeared while on the job. She had been abducted, raped and murdered and her body abandoned.

Shirley tells this...Read more

Three women give birth in different countries and different decades. In the near future, they become neighbours in a coastal town in Aotearoa New Zealand. Single parent Keri has her hands full with four-year-old tearaway Walty and teen Wairere, a strange and gifted child, who always picks...Read more

Hirsch is checking firearms. The regular police all weapons secured, ammo stored separately, no unauthorised person with keys to the gun safe. He’s checking people, too. The drought is hitting hard in the mid-north, and Hirsch is responsible for the welfare of his scattered flock of...Read more

In 1992, toddler Yasmin Munoz goes missing from a rainforest picnic spot near Cairns. No trace of her has ever been found. Yet in 2012, Andrew Todd, a wealthy businessman and former mayor of Cairns, dies, and leaves in his will directions for a search for the missing child, who if she is...Read more

It was the double murder case that gripped Australia, and former Crown Prosecutor Mark Tedeschi QC is finally able to share all the shocking details.

Dorothy Davis and Kerry Whelan were both happy, healthy, affluent, middle-class women from conservative, loving...Read more

We all have secrets . . .

Jodie Garrow is a teenager from the wrong side of the tracks when she falls pregnant. Scared, alone and desperate to make something of her life, she adopts out the baby illegally – and tells nobody.

Twenty-five...Read more

Born in Ramsgate during the 1940s, Brenda Bottle was the youngest of nine in a poor but close family. She left school to work as a secretary for British Rail, where she met her husband. But by the age of twenty-seven, the marriage was over. Brenda left her job and with the little she had...Read more

Set against a backdrop of actual events in 1995, Martyn Percival, a middle-aged New Zealander, seeks adventure on his first OE to the United Kingdom. A chance sighting, providing a possible link between an explosion that has rocked the nation and the whereabouts of a renegade IRA operative...Read more