Updates - Week Ending 5th July

Alec de Payns, espionage operative of the Y Division of the DGSE, France's famed foreign intelligence service, is tasked with tracking down an agent of influence sending highly classified material against the Kremlin to embassies all over Europe.

A deadly conspiracy is aligning the West against Russia. But who is behind it? And to what end?

The clues lead to a secret meeting of businessmen, terrorists and mercenaries on a luxury yacht in the Mediterranean, which de Payns must infiltrate. What he discovers sets off a Europe-wide manhunt in a desperate scramble to prevent an international catastrophe.

Former DGSE spy Jack Beaumont's Dark Arena is another chillingly plausible thriller delivering all the taut plotting, superb action and authentic spycraft that made The Frenchman a critically acclaimed bestseller.

Melbourne 1925. Jasper Fitzalan Howard is found stabbed to death in his room at the exclusive Hotel Windsor. In a bizarre twist, he is clutching a tarot card, the Ten of Swords, in his hand. Initially, the police identify him as a wealthy investor and a cousin of the Duke of Norfolk, but Reggie da Costa, The Argus’s celebrated crime reporter, uncovers a web of lies and deception surrounding Howard’s carefully constructed façade. And, as the truth emerges, that Howard is a confidence man, swindling wealthy businessmen whilst blackmailing their wives, Reggie embarks on a hunt for his killer.  

A local fisherman finds the body of a missing American archaeologist

Detective Inspector Betancourt of the Singapore Marine Police is first on the scene. Something doesn't quite add up. He finds out that the archaeologist, Richard Fulbright, was close to deciphering the previously-untranslatable script on a pre-colonial relic known as the Singapore Stone. This was no accidental drowning.

Is there more to this case than archaeological rivalries?

Betancourt also discovers that Fulbright had been having an affair. He is sure he is onto something bigger than just academic infighting.

A government opium factory draws criminal interest

In his investigations into the death, Betancourt finds his own life in danger, and now he has also put himself on the wrong side of British Military Intelligence, and he is unsure which set of opponents he fears the most...

Florence. Summer, 1538.

A night patrol finds a rich merchant hanged and set ablaze in the city’s main piazza. More than mere murder, this killing is intended to put the fear of God into Florence. Forty years earlier on this date, puritanical monk Girolamo Savonarola was executed the same way in the same place. Does this new killing mean Savonarola’s vengeful spirit has risen again?

Or are his fanatical disciples plotting to revive the monk’s regime of holy terror? Cesare Aldo has his suspicions but is hunting thieves and fugitives in the Tuscan countryside, leaving Constable Carlo Strocchi to investigate the ritual killing. When another important merchant is slain even more publicly than the first, those rich enough to escape the summer heat are fleeing to their country estates. But the Tuscan hills can also be dangerous places.

Soon growing religious fervor combines with a scorching heatwave to drive the city ever closer to madness, while someone is stalking powerful men that forged lifelong alliances during the dark days of Savonarola and his brutal followers. Unless Aldo and Strocchi can work together to stop the killer, Florence could become a bonfire of the vanities once more . . .

It was supposed to be an easy job. All Detective Constable Edward Reekie had to do was pick up a dying prisoner from HMP Grampian and deliver him somewhere to live out his last few months in peace.

From the outside, Glenfarach looks like a quaint, sleepy, snow-dusted village, nestled deep in the heart of Cairngorms National Park, but things aren't what they seem. The place is thick with security cameras and there's a strict nine o'clock curfew, because Glenfarach is the final sanctuary for people who've served their sentences but can't be safely released into the general population. Edward's new boss, DI Montgomery-Porter, insists they head back to Aberdeen before the approaching blizzards shut everything down, but when an ex-cop-turned-gangster is discovered tortured to death in his bungalow, someone needs to take charge. The weather's closing in, tensions are mounting, and time's running out - something nasty has come to Glenfarach, and Edward is standing right in its way...

SEVEN STRANGERS SEEKING REFUGE.
BUT DANGER IS EVERYWHERE THEY TURN...

When Jess accepts an offer to caretake a luxury property in the Australian outback, the isolated, all-inclusive solo trip is just what she needs.

But Jess isn't as alone as she thinks.

As bushfires rage in the distance, strangers start showing up to seek refuge. And as the fires start closing in, tensions in the group begin to rise.

Then, the phones stop working. All exits are cut off. There's no way out.

Quickly, Jess's guests begin to panic. And when the first person goes missing, she realises that someone in the house isn't who they say they are.

The danger is already inside . . .

Literature professor Jack Griffen has recently suffered a nervous breakdown. His wife has divorced him and she and their adult daughter have moved to the USA. Into the void steps exchange student Hieronymus Beck, claiming to be the professor’s greatest fan.

But everything changes when Jack finds Hiero’s list. Five sheets of paper. Five ways to commit a murder.

His student has told him he’s writing a crime novel, but is that all he is doing? Caught up in his protégé’s dangerous game, the mild-mannered professor finds himself asking how far will he go to save a life. As far as murder?

Who killed Martin Friedrich? From award-winning writer Steven Carroll comes the first book in a series of post-war literary crime novels featuring Detective Sergeant Stephen Minter, with shades of The Third Man and Brighton Rock.

Cambridge, UK, 1947. Martin Friedrich, a German philosopher who is in Cambridge to give a series of lectures, is cycling through an intersection on his way to give a lecture when a speeding car runs through him and kills him. A grisly death for one of the finest minds of the age.

Shortly afterwards, Detective Sergeant Stephen Minter, an Austrian-born, cockney Jew, whose parents were interned during the war as enemy aliens, stands over the body of Friedrich contemplating the age-old question - who did it? Because Friedrich might be one of the finest minds of his age, but he's also problematic. A brilliant philosopher whose lectures attracted students from all over Europe before the war and is regarded as the founder of modern existentialism, Friedrich was also, in the 1930s, a member of the Nazi Party.

As Stephen is soon to discover, there is no shortage of suspects. Friedrich -arrogant, a womaniser dedicated solely to his own work over anything or anybody else - was hated by almost everybody, even those who loved him. Is there any sense to his death - a logic to the sequence of events that led to it - or was his death just a case of rotten, random luck?

Has the universe spoken, and, in this sense, should Friedrich be pleased with the nature of his death as it is, after all, confirmation of his life's observations on our indifferent, random universe? Or are there more sinister factors at work? From one of Australia's finest, critically-acclaimed writers, The Death of an Existentialist is a playful mixture of detective story, farce and literary fiction that examines the quite serious question of how to live a meaningful life in an indifferent, random, post-god world.