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| BiP staff review by Leonie |
Jane Harper $32.99pb ** BiP Price $27.95
Kiewarra is a small Victorian town, dying through years of drought and heatwaves. Like many small towns it lives on secrets, lies and suspicion of newcomers. Everyone is shocked when young farmer Luke Hadler is found shot dead, together with his wife Karen and son Billy. His baby daughter Charlotte has been left alive in her cot. The homicide team sent from nearby Clyde quickly sign off on the incident as a murder-suicide. Luke’s parents cannot believe that their son would kill his own family and beg Luke’s childhood best mate, Aaron Falk, to come back for the funerals. Aaron, who is now a Federal police officer specializing in financial crimes, reluctantly makes the long drive up from Melbourne. He left Kiewarra with his father many years earlier after they were both suspected of complicity in the suicide of Aaron’s teenaged friend Ellie Deacon. It does not take long for some of the locals to make it clear to Aaron that he is still not welcome, which makes his stay at the local pub even more unpleasant. After talking to Luke’s parents Falk goes out to the Hadlers’ farm, where he meets the new police sergeant, Raco, who also feels that there is something wrong.
Jane has a distinctive writing style which draws you along page by page. Her descriptions of the town and the drought-stricken countryside are stunning. She has also managed to skilfully maintain an undercurrent of menace throughout the book. I was hooked by the end of the second paragraph. I love reading good books by new Melbourne authors.
Vinegar Girl - The Taming of the Shrew retold
Anne Tyler $29.99pb ** BiP price $24.95
Kate Battista is feeling stuck. How did she end up running house and home for her eccentric scientist father and uppity, pretty younger sister Bunny? Plus, she's always in trouble at work – her pre-school charges adore her, but the adults do not always appreciate her unusual opinions and forthright manner. Dr Battista has other problems. After years out in the academic wilderness, he is on the verge of a breakthrough. His research could help millions. There's only one problem: his brilliant young lab assistant, Pyotr, is about to be deported. And without Pyotr…
When Dr Battista cooks up an outrageous plan that will enable Pyotr to stay in the country, he is relying – as usual – on Kate to help him. Kate is furious: this time he is really asking too much. But will she be able to resist the two men's touchingly ludicrous campaign to win her round? Anne Tyler's retelling of The Taming of the Shrew asks whether a thoroughly modern, independent woman like Kate would ever sacrifice herself for a man. The answer is as individual, off-beat and funny as Kate herself.
Eleanor Brown $29.99pb
Chicago 1999. Madeleine is trapped – by her family’s expectations, by her controlling husband – in an unhappy marriage and a life she never wanted. But when she finds a diary detailing her grandmother Margie’s trip to Jazz Age Paris, she meets a woman she never knew: a dreamer who defied her strict family and spent a summer living on her own, and falling for a charismatic artist. When Madeleine’s marriage is threatened, she escapes to her hometown to stay with her disapproving mother. Shaken by the revelation of a family secret and inspired by her grandmother’s bravery, Madeleine creates her own summer of joy. In reconnecting with her love of painting and cultivating a new circle of friends, the chance of a new life emerges – but will she be bold enough take it?
John Wray $29.99pb
The Lost Time Accidents is a bold and epic saga that races through one family's experience of the twentieth century, embracing philosophy, science, history and politics along the way. Haunted by a failed love affair and the darkest of family secrets, Waldemar 'Waldy' Tolliver wakes one morning to discover that he has been exiled from the flow of time. The world continues to turn, and Waldy is desperate to find his way back. In his fiercely inventive new novel John Wray takes us from turn-of-the-century Viennese salons buzzing with rumours about Einstein's radical new theory to the death camps of the Second World War, from the golden age of post-war pulp science fiction to a startling discovery in a modern-day Manhattan apartment packed to the ceiling with artefacts of contemporary life.
John Lawton $29.99pb
After he shot someone in what he believed was self-defence in the chaos of 1963 Berlin, Joe Wilderness finds himself locked up with little chance of escape. But an official pardon through his father-in-law Burne-Jones, a senior agent at MI6, means he is free to go - although forever in Burne-Jones's service. His latest operation will take him back to Berlin, which is now the dividing line between the West and the Soviets. A story of innocence and intrigue unravels, one in which Wilderness is in and out of Berlin and Vienna like a jack-in-the-box. When the Russians started building the Berlin wall in 1961, two 'Unfortunate Englishmen' were trapped on opposite sides: Geoffrey Masefield in the Lubyanka, and Bernard Alleyn (alias KGB Captain Leonid Liubimov) in Wormwood Scrubs. In 1965 there is a new plan to exchange the prisoners, a swap upon Berlin's bridge of spies. But, as ever, Joe has something on the side, just to make it interesting, just to make it profitable. The Unfortunate Englishman is a thrilling tale of Khrushchev, Kennedy, a spy exchange... and 10,000 bottles of fine Bordeaux. What can possibly go wrong?
Stella Rimington $27.99pb
A new Cold War is coming, and Liz Carlyle is about to find herself on very thin ice. Back in London after a gruelling operation in Paris, she has been posted to MI5's counter-espionage desk. Her bosses hope the new position will give her some breathing space, but they haven't counted on the fallout from Putin's incursions into the Ukraine. Discovering that an elusive Russian spy has entered the UK, Liz needs to track him down before he completes his fatal mission - and plunges Britain back into the fraught days of the Cold War. Meanwhile, following the revelations of whistle-blower Edward Snowden, the intelligence services are in the spotlight. In response to the debate raging around privacy and security, they hire Jasminder Kapoor, a young and controversial civil rights lawyer, to explain the issues to the public. But in this new world of shadowy motives and secret identities, Jasminder must be extra-careful about whom she can trust. Gripping, tense and drawn from her own experience as Head of MI5, Stella Rimington's latest thriller brings the new Cold War vividly to life.
