March Picks

Burr, Shelley (2022) Wake. Hachette. Nineteen years ago Mina McCreery's nine-year-old twin sister, Evelyn, went missing from their shared bedroom on an outback New South Wales sheep station. The mystery remains unsolved and the reward unclaimed. The trauma is elevated by ongoing public interest that reverberates throughout the small community of Nannine. The vanishing has… Continue reading March Picks

February Picks

Littlewood, Fran (2023) Amazing Grace Adams. M. Joseph. After being stuck in traffic gridlock Grace lets her menopausal rage take charge as she travels through London, on foot, to deliver a cake for her estranged daughter's sixteenth birthday. The story takes place over the course of a really bad day. She has become unhinged by… Continue reading February Picks

January Picks

Auletta, Ken (2022) Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence. Penguin. This meticulous portrait of all-powerful Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein reads like a brutal horror story. His significant talent and creative ability gave him unassailable power and the opportunity to lead a life of great indulgence and rapacity. His monstrous sexual appetites, bullying… Continue reading January Picks

December Picks

Kingsolver, Barbara (2022) Demon Copperhead. Faber. The problem with a novel that takes its inspiration from a celebrated classic is that you know you have to go through a lot of angst before you get to the good stuff. Damon Fields, aka Demon Copperhead, is an Appalachian David Copperfield born to a teenage single mother… Continue reading December Picks

November Picks

Strout, Elizabeth (2022) Lucy by the Sea. Viking. It is March 2020 and Covid has struck New York. Lucy Barton's ex-husband William pleads with her to go into isolation with him in Maine, where he has rented a house. As the months go by Lucy and William learn to live together again. The quiet rhythm… Continue reading November Picks

October Picks

Harper, Jane (2022) Exiles. Macmillan. Federal investigator Aaron Falk returns to solve the mystery of Kim Gillespie's disappearance at a South Australian food and wine festival. A year on, Kim's vanishing has cast a dark shadow on the small tight-knit community of Marralee where Aaron is set to become godfather to the son of his… Continue reading October Picks

September Picks

Galbraith, Robert (2022) The Ink Black Heart. Sphere. When Edie Ledwell, the co-creator of popular YouTube cartoon The Ink Black Heart, pleads with private detective Robin Ellacott to uncover the identity of Anomie, her online persecutor, Robin turns her away. Then Edie is murdered in Highgate Cemetery. Robin and her partner Cormoran Strike become embroiled… Continue reading September Picks

August Picks

De Goldi, Kate (2022) Eddy, Eddy. Allen & Unwin. In the two years since Eddy Smallbone dramatically left school, and earthquakes destroyed his home city, he has struggled to navigate life and find himself. Eddy is a sweet lost soul. His pet-minding business has extended into friend and child sitting, and although his life is… Continue reading August Picks

July Picks

Browder, Bill (2022) Freezing Order: A True Story of Russian Money Laundering, Murder and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath. Simon & Schuster. This mind-blowing book reads like a thrilling tale of espionage, rather than a memoir. It is a compelling caper of crime and corruption, assassinations, bribery and intimidation, legal battles, tax evasion, and the laundering… Continue reading July Picks

June Picks

McTiernan, Dervla (2022) The Murder Rule. HarperCollins. Third-year law student Hannah Rokeby sought to become a volunteer on a Virginia university's Innocence Project. The focus of the Project was to revisit the convictions of wrongly-jailed prisoners. But innocence wasn't Hannah's motive in volunteering for the program. She was seeking to right a wrong done to… Continue reading June Picks