Predictability is overrated. Which is another way of saying this newsletter should have come out in early September and it didn't.
But on the upside a lot of reading and reviewing has been getting done so maybe less posting, more reading might be the trick I've been searching for.
Anyway in the review lists:
I caught up on some badly overdue ones The Pool by Hannah Tunnicliffe, Murder on the Marlow Belle by Robert Thorogood being particular cases in point. Then got stuck into some "Other Places" books The Restaurant of Lost Recipes by Hisashi Kashiwai and Innocent Guilt by Remi Kone (this last one is highly recommended by the way).
Then the locals, firstly the standouts in amongst them included Five Found Dead by Sulari Gentill, The Unquiet Grave by Dervla McTiernan, Black Silk and Buried Secrets by Deborah Challinor, Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane, The Hollow Girl by Lyn Yeowart, One Dark Night by Hannah Richell and The White Feather Murders by Laraine Stephens. In terms of recommendations from this list then they are all good and very very different, but Five Found Dead is great fun, Black Silk and Buried Secrets is fascinating (and part of an ongoing series by the looks of it), Highway 13 incredibly clever, and The White Feather Murders another really good entrant in this Melbourne based historical series.
The not so standout (okay so I had no idea what the hell was going on here but didn't like any of it) was The Empress Murders by Toby Schmitz which I suspect is a very long / straight example of YMMV. In that vein Adam Donnison took one for domestic harmony and read / and wasn't impressed by The Turing Protocol by Nick Croydon.
On the NZ piles (which are still very behind which I'm feeling very guilty about but will try to do better) The Deeper the Dead by Catherine Lea, The Night She Fell by Eileen Merriman and The Birthmark Murders by Janus Lucky. All very different, but could appeal to a range of readers. I particularly like the series that The Deeper the Dead is part of.
Of the reading stacks of recent and past days Dust by Michael Brissenden was an excellent read exploring the way that the conspiracy theorist groups (cookers et al) can be used and manipulated in so many different ways. And I've just started Everyone in This Bank is a Thief by Benjamin Stevenson and am hooked, well and truly.
(Images below should all be active links taking you to the full book listing and/or the review already available on the site).
Recent Arrivals
Firstly, you would have all read about the Bendigo Writers Festival's mishandling of external pressure. In light of their behaviour some of the recent arrivals are books from the writers who withdrew (listed in no particular order):
Released 30/5/2023: Winner of the David Unaipon Award, an engaging, moving and often funny yarn about growing up in the home of two Aunties running a sheep farm in rural Gundagai.
Released 21/3/2022: 'I told you this was a thirst so great it could carve rivers.'This fierce debut from award-winning writer Evelyn Araluen confronts the tropes and iconography of an unreconciled nation with biting satire and lyrical fury.
Released 1/1/2017: Jacky was running. There was no thought in his head, only an intense drive to run. There was no sense he was getting anywhere, no plan, no destination, no future. All he had was a sense of what was behind, what he was running from. Jacky was running.
Released 1/10/2024 This is the story of a founding document in Australian democracy and the people who made it. It paints a vibrant picture of the profound and ancient culture of Australia’s first peoples, in all its continuing vigour.
Released 1/7/2012: Esma's quest for The One was never going to be easy but when family, friends and meddling employers are thrown into the equation, her path to true love suddenly takes a great big detour.
Released 2/9/2025: With a focus on two of today's most contested fields, academia and the media, Discipline tallies the price we all pay when those with privilege choose to remain silent.
Released 2/8/2023: One of the lucky few with a job during the Depression, Peggy’s just starting out in life. She’s a bagging girl at the Angliss meatworks in Footscray, a place buzzing with life as well as death, where the gun slaughterman Jack has caught her eye – and she his.
Released 1/5/2024: Peripathetic is about shit jobs. About being who you are and who you aren't online. About knowing a language four times. About living on the interstices. About thievery. About wanting. About the hyperreal. About weirdness.
Released 28/1/2025: Sonia Orchard was in her forties when she told a therapist about the boyfriend she had when she was fifteen. Sure, he had been a decade older than her, but it was consensual ... wasn't it? To her surprise, Sonia broke down in tears, then began to shake uncontrollably - an unmistakable expression of trauma that lasted for days. She was clearly not okay, but could the relationship she'd thought was loving really have been abuse? Had she been groomed?
New Releases & More Recent Arrivals
Recent Releases may or may not also be recent arrivals, but I've combined the two listings here as this relates mostly (but not all) to crime fiction.
Starting out with the Australian / NZ Contingent:
Released 29/7/2025: In 1915, two days before being sent to fight in WWI, Jack O'Rourke dived into Sydney Harbour to save a drowning stranger, Samuel Lomond. Four years later, battle-scarred and weary, Jack returns home only to discover that Samuel has been brutally murdered – and that he's been left his rural property, Booroomba.
Released 5/8/2025: Did anyone know Dr Gabriel Beaufort better than Ruby Rose Gillespie? They were friends at high school. They are secret lovers now. And because he is also the lung-transplant surgeon who saved her life, Ruby will forever be in his debt. But then the body of Dr Beaufort is found in the wetlands next to the hospital, on the same day as cystic fibrosis sufferer Ruby is readmitted with a sudden fever.
Released 31/7/2025: Everyone thinks they can trust their therapist. We are good listeners. But what if we’re good liars, too?
Released 26/8/2025: 3rd Billie Walker Mystery - Naples, 1943. Deep within a secret network of underground tunnels, a woman takes shelter from a wartime air raid and prays her husband will return safely.
Released 26/8/2025: On the remote West Coast of the South Island, vast forests stretch out between mountain ranges and rugged beaches. There, in the small town of Koraha, not a lot happens - until a young girl with blood on her hands walks out of the bush and into the local store, collapsing to the floor.
Released 26/8/2025: After her parents’ death in a car crash two years ago, Eve is back in the tumbledown family house on Magnetic Island, surrounded by nosy neighbours, an over-friendly possum and a cast of eccentric locals.
Released 2/9/2025: It’s 1973 and Detective Sergeant Eleanor Smith is finally assigned her first homicide case. A woman’s body has been discovered at Harrowford Hall, a home for unmarried mothers deep in the Victorian countryside. (There's a review of this one on the site already).
Released 2/9/2025: In the middle of the night in a remote part of Western Australia's goldfields, the thud of a mallet on a marker peg sets off a chain reaction that unearths secrets long buried.
Released 2/9/2025: Jessica Mowbrie, beaten and dumped in the bush like a sack of garbage and lying comatose in a hospital bed: lucky to be alive.
Released 2/9/2025: Senior Detective Antigone Pollard is fearless. Armed with a trained police dog, a black belt in judo and the will to speak her mind, she faces opposition head-on.
Released 30/9/2025: Ten suspects. Ten heists. A puzzle only Ernest Cunningham can solve. I’ve spent the last few years solving murders. But a bank heist is a new one, even for me. I’ve never been a hostage before. The doors are chained shut. No one in or out. Which means that when someone in the bank is murdered, hostages become suspects.
Released 1/10/2025: All-round chaos merchant Nell Jenkins has returned to her small hometown to fulfil family duties for the mother and brother she' s barely seen since making her escape as a teen. But her homecoming isn' t the triumph it should be.
Released 1/10/2025: Follow Paul Cutler on his next adventure as he fights the cocaine gold rush. Assuming his new identity as Paul O’Keefe, Paul is tasked with finding the supplier of a surge of Mexican cartel meth flooding Australian streets. Assigned to infiltrate a newly appointed security company at Fremantle Port, he discovers a clandestine world of off-the-books operations, and a business front that goes far beyond mere security. There’s a dangerous game afoot for who gets control of the port’s smuggling operations, and O’Keefe is caught in the crossfire.
Released 14/10/2025: In a dying town, Ro Crowley waits for her son on the evening of his 21st birthday. but Sam never comes home. His footprints in the dust of three abandoned houses offer the only clue to his final movements. One set in. One set out.
Released 28/10/2025: Em has lived a quiet life with her complicated mother and is now looking for love and a potential escape from her small hometown. When a masked man kidnaps her in the dark of night, though, she is drawn into a terrifying world.
Released 2/11/2025: DS Nick Chester returns with a new case that will test his limits. The tiny South Island town of Franz Josef is perched precariously on New Zealand’s Alpine Fault. It already faces devastating earthquakes, floods and landslides. And now it harbours a killer.
Released 25/11/2025: 3rd in the Jesse Redpath series, It’s the festive season in the Windmark Ranges and Sergeant Jesse Redpath’s day is going from bad to worse. It begins with her having to arrest the usual drunks and troublemakers and ends with the death of a colleague out on the Redline road. A death which may or may not have been an accident.
Released 30/12/2025: Sixteen years ago, teenage Maddie Marshall's body was found on a desolate beach near her hometown, Carrinya. Vibrant, feisty Maddie was the only daughter of a high-profile politician. The case was the talk of the town but was ultimately never solved.
Released 24/2/2026: "You’re not going to murder me in the night, are you?" Emily asks. "Haha. That’s funny," I say. Of course, I’m not going to murder her in the night. I need my laptop back first. That’s the whole point of making friends with Emily Harper, author of the hugely successful novel Diary of an Octopus . So I could get inside her apartment and take back what’s mine.
Other Locations:
Released 2/7/2024: Fierce, mixed-race fighter Shindo has been kidnapped by the yakuza. After brutally beating most of them in an attempt to escape, she is forced to work as a bodyguard to protect the gang boss's sheltered daughter Shoko, a strange, friendless eighteen-year-old who could order Shindo's death in a moment.
Released 28/8/2025: The Pink Labyrinth is one of the bomb-scarred city's most shady neighbourhoods. There, in the dead of night a patrolling policeman catches a young Buddhist monk digging in the back yard of The Black Cat Cafe, a notorious brothel. In the shallow grave at his feet lie the dead body of a woman, her face disfigured beyond recognition, and the corpse of a black cat.
Released 11/9/2025: Do you know the name for someone who loves reading in bed, or what a binfluencer does? How about the medieval invention of Lubberland as a place for lazy teenagers, or the story of Mayday as a request for help? Lexicographer extraordinaire and Queen of Countdown's Dictionary Corner, Susie Dent does and here are her greatest discoveries.
Released 19/9/2025: What happens when a serial killer forgets that he’s a serial killer? At Sunset House the tea is barely introduced to a teabag, the carpets are permanently flecked with glitter and care assistant Jolene would rather be watching daytime television than caring for the elderly – but someone might just have confessed to murder.
Released 25/9/2025: Who's got time to think about murder when there's a wedding to plan? It’s been a quiet year for the Thursday Murder Club. Joyce is busy with table plans and first dances. Elizabeth is grieving. Ron is dealing with family troubles, and Ibrahim is still providing therapy to his favourite criminal.
Released 30/9/2025: When the invitation to attend the press opening of a luxury Swiss hotel—owned by reclusive billionaire Marcus Leidmann—arrives, it’s like the answer to a prayer. Three years after the birth of her youngest child, Lo Blacklock is ready to reestablish her journalism career, but post-pandemic travel journalism is a very different landscape from the one she left ten years ago.
Released 23/10/2025: A darkly humorous and warmly touching suspense novel about friendship, love and death, The Winter Job flies a hundred and twenty kilometres an hour straight into the darkest heart of a Finnish winter night.
Released 3/3/2026: In the beautiful and dangerous landscape of Lake Geneva, in the shadow of the Swiss Alps, renowned writer Marceau Miller is found dead. In the wake of the tragedy, his wife, Sarah, discovers a manuscript he’s left behind, entitled The Story of Marceau Miller.
As always I've undoubtedly missed something, so feel free to nudge me if there is anything that should be included next time around. Whenever that is.
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