Updates - up to 6th October

It is May 1957. In London eight friends gather for a party. They are all displaced persons who have survived the worst World War II could throw at them. This gathering will be a time to share the fragile joy of liberty. But before the night is out, one of them will be dead. Who would commit such a crime? And why? Detective Andrew Perry, together with his naive sidekick, James Cook, is assigned the unenviable task of searching through the horrific memories of the survivors, looking for the beginning of the thread that will lead him to a solution.

They’re the perfect couple. They have the perfect plan. All they need is the perfect victim.

Julia and Christopher Hygate have the picture-perfect Gobs of money thanks to their lucrative shipping enterprise, an estate on a secluded island, and a baby on the way.

When they meet Eve Sylvester, they know she is the exact person they should hire to be their son’s nanny. Eve doesn’t have any living relatives, she’s lost touch with her friends, and her partner is out of the picture. Best of all, she’s also expecting a child.

Eve thinks she’s landed the best possible gig—previously desperate and penniless, now she’ll live like a queen and have a promising future for her daughter.

But the job seems too good to be true. Why would the Hygates hire Eve if she has no prior nannying experience? Why must Eve stay out of sight? And what’s with the mysterious yachts coming in and out of the Hygate’s private marina?

It's too late to ask questions, though, Eve is already in far too deep to turn back.

Set against the backdrop of a remote island, an endless stream of secrets, and unbelievable wealth, No One Will Know is a propulsive, seductive novel of suspense that shows the terrible consequences of shocking greed, staggering lies, and fatal mistakes.

Meet Agatha Dorn, cantankerous archivist, grammar pedant, gin afficionado and murder mystery addict. When she discovers a lost manuscript by Gladden Green, the Empress of Golden Age detective fiction, Agatha's life takes an unexpected twist. She becomes an overnight sensation, basking in the limelight of literary stardom.

But Agatha's newfound fame takes a nosedive when the 'rediscovered' novel is exposed as a hoax. And when her ex-lover turns up dead, with a scrap of the manuscript by her side, Agatha suspects foul play.

Cancelled, ostracised and severely ticked off, Agatha turns detective to uncover the sinister truth that connects the murder and the fraudulent manuscript. But can she stay sober long enough to catch the murderer, or will Agatha become a whodunit herself?

A sleepy coastal town. Deep secrets. Deadly truths.

'Speak your truth. Or at least the truth you want others to believe.'

Handywoman Barb Young has lived in the sleepy coastal town of Bullford Point for over fifty years - and frankly, in that time, not much has happened, unless you count that business where a bush turkey managed to board the ferry a couple of years ago.

When Joe Griffiths returns from Sydney after six years of drug addiction, jail and, eventually, rehab, Barb offers him a job, hoping to help him turn his life around. However, when another new resident of Bullford Point is murdered, Joe becomes the prime suspect.

Barb thinks the police have got it wrong, but the more she tries to find the truth and clear Joe's name, the more confusing things become. Is the murder connected to the developers circling the waterfront home Joe inherited from his parents? Or to the true crime podcast he has been making about the death of his ex-girlfriend, seven years previously? And what was the information the murdered woman had been trying to horse-trade with police?

As her off-the-books investigation continues, Barb discovers that drowsy Bullford Point is actually a town full of secrets - and that even though she's known everyone in the close-knit community for years ... everybody lies.

She's the one to turn to when you need saving. But first she has to save herself...

Lou Alcott is turning over a new leaf as a private investigator. Formerly police, she was forced to resign when she attacked a domestic violence perpetrator. She's always vowed to be nothing like her grandfather Hamish, Melbourne's biggest crime boss, delivering an eye for an eye, but this guy had it coming.

On her first day she draws two cases helping at-risk women. First there's Diane Paterson, who has apparently left her husband without a word. Who should Lou believe? The charmingly distraught husband, Diane's suspicious parents, or the freezer full of lovingly prepared food left behind?

Then a house security check for an isolated young woman who is convinced her abusive ex is stalking her again turns worrisome when she fails to show up for their meeting. Lou reports Melinda's odd disappearance to the police but with no signs of a struggle she fears they're not able to act quickly enough.

With her protective radar pinging, Lou keeps digging until she unearths chilling evidence that puts her in the hot seat. Suddenly Lou is embroiled in a cat-and-mouse-game where there will only be one survivor... Will Lou's first case be her last?

To new nanny Amanda, the Temple family seem to have it all: the former actress; the famous professor; their three successful grown-up children. But like any family, beneath the smiles and hugs there lurks far darker emotions.

Sixteen years earlier, little Niamh Temple died while they were on holiday in Portugal. Now, as Amanda joins the family for a reunion at their seaside villa, she begins to suspect one of them might be hiding something terrible...

And suspicion is a dangerous thing.

When an anonymous letter is delivered to the Clarendon English Dictionary, it is rapidly clear that this is not the usual lexicographical enquiry. Instead, the letter hints at secrets and lies linked to a particular year.

For Martha Thornhill, the new senior editor, the date can mean only one thing: the summer her brilliant older sister Charlie went missing.

After a decade abroad, Martha has returned home to the city whose ancient institutions have long defined her family. Have the ghosts she left behind her been waiting for her return?

When more letters arrive, and Martha and her team pull apart the complex clues within them, the mystery becomes ever more insistent and troubling. It seems Charlie had been keeping a powerful secret, and someone is trying to lead the lexicographers towards the truth. But other forces are no less desperate to keep it well and truly buried.

She'd known there would be ghosts in Oxford. Martha wasn't afraid of any headless horsemen, or nuns haunting the local ruins; it was Charlie, always Charlie she was afraid would find her.

Guilty by Definition is a love letter not only to language but to the city of Oxford, wrapped within an intriguing mystery of a missing woman and considering the emotional aftershocks of her disappearance on those left behind.

After failed attempts to make a different future, Brad Chen returns to the Australian capital to reprise his role as the city's number one murder investigator. Where others see mere coincidence in the deaths of three friends, Chen soon sees clear and sinister purpose. His efforts to bring the killer to justice will test him in every way. And matters aren't helped by a mystery woman's determination to sabotage his new life or by the physical and mental burdens of his rough and tumble past.

"Best Served Cold" is the long awaited return of Chen by award winning author Kel a classic revenge tale set in Canberra, on the South Coast of New South Wales and in harbourside Sydney. It delivers more of the witty dialogue, wry observations and complex plotting that fans of the smart-talking Chinese-Australian detective have come to expect.

When Roz Chen's wife, Niamh, is killed in a hit-and-run on a lonely Tasmanian road, the grieving widow begins to wonder if Niamh's death was an accident after all. Meanwhile, SAS veteran Sam Willard is hoping for a fresh start with a job at a salmon farm. But as allegations of old war crimes surface and Sam is 'promoted' as a special operative against anti-salmon farm activists, he and Roz form an unlikely alliance.

Forced to retreat into the unforgiving Tasmanian wilderness, Roz and Sam find themselves scrambling for the truth with murderous thugs on their trail.

For Broome detective Dan Clement, it seems that crime is as plentiful as wet season rain. When his sergeant is beaten up, and a woman is brutally assaulted, it seems like the same two suspects are behind both incidents. But when a woman' s hand is discovered in crocodile-infested waters, things take a macabre turn. The stakes rise sky-high as Dan races against time to solve this complex and puzzling case.

When several small-town locals die under mysterious circumstances, an aspiring journalist is determined to prove the connection between them, only to discover the dangerous secrets they left behind.

Boney Creek is a dying town where not a lot happens. The perfect solution for married couple Addie and Toby who are escaping their own personal tragedy. But a quiet and simple life is not exactly possible with so many recent, strange deaths.

Seven locals, all gone too soon. That’s the nature of tragic accidents. And in a town this small, there’s no room for too many questions.

But Addie isn’t so sure. Although she never followed through on her dreams of becoming a journalist, she still has a reporter’s instincts. And her gut—not to mention all the small-town gossip—is telling her that whatever’s happening in Boney Creek is not as random as it seems.

There’s no such thing as coincidence, especially when it comes to seven bodies. And while burying her own secrets, Addie digs up far greater ones that will have her asking if she will be the town’s next so-called accident.

It's the height of summer in Australia, 1979, and on a quiet suburban cul-de-sac a housewife is scrubbing the yellow and white checkered tiles of the bathroom floor. But all is not as it seems. For one thing, it's 3am. For another, she is trying desperately to remove all traces of blood before they stain. Her husband seems remarkably calm, considering he has just murdered their neighbour.

As the sun rises on Warrah Place, news of Antonio Marietti's death spreads like wildfire, gossip is exchanged in whispers and suspicion mounts. Twelve-year-old Tammy, an amateur observational scientist, is not alone in feeling determined to find out what happened. There are secrets behind every closed door in the neighbourhood, and the identity of the murderer is only one of them . . .

A small mining town. A brutal double murder. A killer among them.

DS Lucas Walker is off duty. He's supposed to be showing his little sister Grace the Australian outback, on her visit from Boston, but instead they're headed out bush- where Walker's cousin has been mining for boulder opal. Something seemed off when Walker heard that Blair wanted to get out of Kanpara, so he and Grace are en route to bring him home to Caloodie.

But Kanpara is in Channel Country, and a major flood is on the way.

The atmosphere in the isolated mining town is already tense with rumours of a big opal find, and whenWalker, Grace and Blair wake up the next day they find themselves completely cut off. A deluge far north has run off into the rivers that make up this unique ecosystem, and the roads will be impassable for days. As they take in their predicament, Blair receives a shocking phone call.

Two bodies have been found, brutally murdered.

The husband is an immediate suspect, but Walker is not convinced. And when Blair is taken in for questioning, the stakes couldn't be higher. Before the water recedes, he must work with local police to uncover the killer in their midst. Can Walker act fast enough to save his cousin, and keep Grace safe?

Every object has a ghost.

There is a small yellow backpack - half unzipped, mouth yawning to the pavement, contents strewn around it (a banana, an exercise book, a pair of scissors) - abandoned on a suburban footpath.

Ten feet away, the rubber stamp of tyres, resisting clamped brakes, mount the curb and cut across the path. The tracks come to an end at a crippled stop sign.

The street, a tree-lined suburban road dappled in late-afternoon sunlight, is calm. But anyone walking past can feel the ghosts: the prickle on the back of their necks that tells them something happened here. The story of a vehicle careening to a halt. Of a child’s backpack left in a hurry.

That intuition all comes before they take a closer look, and see there is dark, dry red on the scissor’s blade. The ghosts are screaming now; the scene’s memory turns violent. And as the passers-by raise their phones to answer the question what is your emergency? They see more red. Between the tyre-tracks and the blood. There are two words, hastily scrawled on the sidewalk. Written in blood.

June Wright had already published three popular mysteries by the time she created her most memorable detective, the Reverend Mother Mary St Paul of the Cross.

The kindly Mother Paul may seem vague and otherwordly, but little escapes her attention—she has a shrewd grasp of everything that’s going on beneath the surface. In Reservation for Murder, the first of three Mother Paul novels (originally published in 1958), she is in charge of a residential hostel for young women who work in offices and shops in Melbourne.

A tense atmosphere pervades the house—many of the residents have received unpleasant anonymous letters, and there is much speculation as to their author. When Mary Allen finds a stranger stabbed in the garden, who dies after uttering a mysterious name, and a few days later one of the residents is found drowned, an apparent suicide, the tension reaches fever pitch. Is there a connection between these two deaths? Or between them and the letters?

The police investigation, abetted by the resourceful Mary Allen, proceeds in fits and starts, but meanwhile Mother Paul pursues her own enquiries.

It's 1974 in the Riverina

The weather is hot

But the body in the Murray River is stone cold . . .

A captivating and compulsive crime thriller about guns, drugs and a young woman dead on the money

Riverina 1974:

When nineteen-year-old farmgirl Adelaide Hoffman applies for a cadetship at the Gunnawah Gazette, she sees it as her ticket out of a life too small for her. Its owner, Valdene Bullark, sees something of the girl she once was in young Adelaide.

Val puts Adelaide straight to work. What starts as a routine assignment covering an irrigation project soon puts Adelaide on the trail of a much bigger story. Water is money in farming communities, and when Adelaide starts asking questions, it's as if she's poked a stick in a bull ant's nest. Violence follows. Someone will do whatever it takes to stop Adelaide and Val finding out how far the river of corruption and crime runs.

Shady deals. Vested interests. A labyrinth of lies. It seems everyone in Gunnawah has a secret to keep. But how many want to stop Adelaide dead?

Faculty of Murder is set at Brigid Moore Hall, a girls' hostel in the University of Melbourne, where "freshettes" are shocked by a new arrival, Judith Mornane, who announces that she intends to discover her sister's murderer. Her sister, Maureen, had mysteriously disappeared from the hostel the year before, at about the same time that a professor's wife had accidentally drowned. It is left to the newly arrived Warden, Mother Paul, together with Elizabeth Drew, the Humanities tutor, to draw the police's attention to possibilities they might not have considered.

Mother Paul, the incomparable nun-detective, is faced with her most perplexing case when a former pupil at her convent school is murdered at their annual reunion.

As a schoolgirl Maisie Ryan was often bullied by her peers, but a decade later she’s a TV star, the glamorously renamed Rianne May. When she’s invited to be guest of honour at Maryhill College’s annual reunion, she has a chance to dazzle her old tormentors the way she does her adoring television audience. But as she’s holding court at the reunion tea party, old grudges and new jealousies swirl around her—and suddenly one of her tablemates drops dead, poisoned. Was Rianne the intended victim? She evidently thinks so—only that day she’d received a death threat. Rianne flees the scene and cannot be found.

Who is the murderer? And what has happened to Rianne May?

Fortunately, the school’s principal is Mother Paul, who immediately calls for Detective Inspector Savage. She assisted him (or was it the other way around?) in solving a previous case (Faculty of Murder), and between them the unlikely pair will unravel this one too. But there will be more drama—and more deaths—before the murderer is uncovered.

Moving between the brash new realm of television in the early 1960s and the cloistered atmosphere of a girls’ convent school, Make-Up for Murder is the third and final Mother Paul novel and a must-read for all fans of June Wright’s blend of intrigue, wit, and psychological suspense.

A VIP Protection job goes wrong, the brutalised body of a young man is found in the jungle, a triad wants its $2.5 million back, a girl goes missing and a friend is murdered. Galahad Jones’ world is about to tilt.When a simple VIP Protection job goes horribly wrong, Galahad Jones is troubled by the circumstances and launches an investigation that drags him back into the seamy world of Hong Kong politics, triad influence and official corruption.Meanwhile, a young man is viciously murdered on a remote hiking trail, and as more victims emerge, it is soon clear a serial killer is stalking the streets of Hong Kong. But Galahad has the more immediate problem of staying one step ahead of a violent triad enforcer who is hunting for stolen millions in triad cash and is prepared to kill to find it.With the return of a dark spectre from the past, Galahad is drawn into the chase to find and stop the serial killer before he strikes again – this time closer to home.With the clock ticking, and his life spiralling out of control, Galahad is on a desperate manhunt that can only end one way – in blood. The question who is the hunter and who is the hunted?

Three friends travel to Marcoy, a regional town for a weekend away from family life. One year ago, a tragic incident splintered the group, and the women have seen little of each other since.

Melissa has slept much of the past twelve months away, and she hopes this weekend will help her re-emerge from the depression she’s been living with. Bridie worries that she is not a good enough mother. She worries about most things, really, but she’s dealing with things just fine. At least that’s what she tells herself. In fact, she only agreed to this weekend away out of a sense of duty.

What Cassandra really needs is a break, so she’s come away to forget it all, to enjoy a cab-sav and an open fire and the company of her long lost friends.

This weekend is about reconnecting, about enjoying their friendship the way they used to, while not—at any cost—having to address the reason for the distance between them. But when they witness a young girl being coerced into a car by a father she fears, they are forced to reckon with the chasm of grief and trauma that’s kept them apart.

Two small-town booksellers (and their cowardly dog) solve a decades-old murder-mystery in this witty debut novel, full of literary clues, sparkling dialogue, and comedic insights into the world of bookshops.

“When we opened Sherlock Tomes people warned us that we’d made a terrible mistake. People warned us that e-readers were taking over. People warned us that we’d never compete with Amazon. The one thing they didn’t warn us about was the murders…”

Introducing...the Bookshop Detectives!

When a mystery parcel arrives at Sherlock Tomes bookshop in small-town Havelock North, New Zealand, husband-and-wife owners Garth and Eloise (and their petrified pooch, Stevie) are drawn into the baffling case of a decades-old missing schoolgirl.

Intrigued by the puzzling, bookish clues the two ex-cops are soon tangled in a web of crime, drugs, and floral decapitations, while endeavouring to pull off the international celebrity book launch of the century.

With their beloved shop on the chopping block and the sinister suspect who forced them to run away from Blighty re-emerging from the shadows, have Garth and Eloise Sherlock finally met their Moriarty?

For once, the cover copy is no exaggeration: Diary of a Bookseller really does meet Thursday Murder Club meets Bookseller at the End of the World in this witty debut novel, full of literary clues, comedic insights and the kinds of Kiwis you only ever meet in bookshops.