Recent Books

Cuddy (July 2023)

By Benjamin Myers

July 27, 2023

Cuddy is a bold and experimental retelling of the story of the hermit St Cuthbert, unofficial patron saint of the North of England.

Incorporating poetry, prose, play, diary and real historical accounts to create a novel like no other, Cuddy straddles historical eras – from the first Christian-slaying Viking invaders of the holy island of Lindisfarne in the eighth century to a contemporary England defined by class and austerity.

Along the way we meet brewers and masons, archers and academics, monks and labourers, their visionary  voices and stories echoing through their ancestors and down the ages.

And all the while at the centre sits Durham Cathedral and the lives of those who live and work around this place of pilgrimage – their dreams, desires, connections and communities.

After That Night (July 2023)

By Karin Slaughter

July 25, 2023

After that night, nothing was ever the same again

Fifteen years ago, Sara Linton’s life changed forever when a celebratory night out ended in a violent attack that tore her world apart.  Since then, Sara has remade her life.  A successful doctor, engaged to a man she loves, she has finally managed to leave the past behind her.

Until one evening, on call in the ER, everything changes.  Sara battles to save a broken woman who’s been brutally attacked.  But as the investigation progresses, led by GBI Special Agent Will Trent, it becomes clear that Dani Cooper’s assault is uncannily linked to Sara’s.

And it seems the past isn’t going to stay buried forever…

The Mother (July 2023)

By Jane Caro

July 13, 2023

Just like the garden, the fuse box, the bills, bin night and blown light bulbs, this was just something else she’d now have to take care of herself.

Recently widowed, Miriam Duffy is a respectable North Shore real estate agent and devoted mother and grandmother.  She was thrilled when her younger daughter Ally married her true love, but as time goes by Miriam wonders whether all is well with Ally, as she moves to the country and gradually withdraws, finding excuses every time Miriam offers to visit.  Their relationship has always had its ups and downs, and Miriam tries to give her daughter the distance she so clearly wants.  But is all as it seems?

When the truth of her daughter’s situation is revealed,, Miriam watches in disbelief as Ally and her children find themselves increasingly vulnerable and cut off from the world.  As the situation escalates and the law proves incapable of protecting them, Miriam is faced with an unthinkable decision.  But she will do anything for the people she loves most in the world.  Wouldn’t you?

Vanished (July 2023)

By James Delargy

July 13, 2023

The Kane family, Lorcan, Naiyana and their young son, relocate from Perth to Kallayee, an abandoned mining town in the Great Victoria Desert, to start over again, free from their chequered past.

The town seems like the perfect getaway: Peaceful. Quiet. Remote.  Somewhere they won’t be fouond.

But life in Kallayee isn’t quite as straightforward as they hope.  There are noises in the earth, mysterious shadows and tracks in the dust as if the town is coming back to life.

But the family won’t leave.  No one can talk sense to them.

And now, no one can talk to them at all.

They’ve simply vanished.

Now it’s up to Detective Emmaline Taylor to find them… Before It’s Too Late.

Suspects (July 2023)

By Lesley Pearse

July 13, 2023

Welcome to Willow Close, where everyone is a suspect…

On the day Nina and Conrad Best move into their new home in picture-perfect Willow Close a body is discovered.

Hurrying inside with their belongings, they see horrified neighbours gather by the police cordon – one of the residents has been attacked and brutally killed in the woods.

Believing someone must have seen the murderer, the police interview all the residents of the close.  They soon find out that each neighbour harbours their own secrets.

The residents of Willow Close are far from what they initially seem – and strange, even dark, things happen behind their closed doors.

Nina and Conrad had thought they’d found their dream neighbourhood.  But have they moved into a nightmare?

The Power of the Dog (July 2023)

By Thomas Savage

July 13, 2023

Phil and George are brothers and joint owners of the biggest ranch in their Montana valley.  Phil is the bright one, George the plodder.  Phil is tall and angular, George is stocky and silent.  Phil is a brilliant chess player, a voracious reader, an eloquent storyteller, George learns slowly, and devotes himself to the business.  They sleep in the same room they shared as boys, and so it has been for forty years.

When George unexpectedly marries a young widow and brings her to live at the ranch, Phil begins a relentless campaign to destroy his brother’s new wife.  But he fails to reckon with an unlikely protector.

The Last Dance (June 2023)

By Mark Billingham

June 8, 2023

The first in a stunning new series

He’s a detective, a dancer, he has no respect for authority – and he’s the best hope Blackpool has for keeping criminals off the streets.  Meet Detective Decian Miller.

A double murder in a seaside hotel sees a grieving Miller return to work to solve what appears to be a case of mistaken identity.  Just why where two completely unconnected men taken out?

Despite a somewhat dubious relationship with both reality and his new partner, can the eccentric, offbeat Miller find answers where his colleagues have found only an impossible puzzle?

The Axeman’s Carnival (June 2023)

By Catherine Chidgey

June 8, 2023

Everywhere, the birds: sparrows and skylarks and thrushes, starlings and bellbirds, fantails and pipits – but above them all and louder, the magpies.  We are here and this is our tree and we’re staying and it is ours and you need to leave and now.

Tama is just a helpless chick when he is rescued by Marnie, and this is where his story might have ended.  ‘If it keeps me awake,’ says Marnie’s husband Rob, a farmer, ‘I’ll have to wring its neck.’  But with Tama came new possibilities for the couple’s future.  Tama can speak, and his fame is growing.  Outside, in the pines, his father warns him of the wickedness wrought by humans.  Indoors, Marnie confides in him about her violent marriage.  The more Tama sees, the more the animal and human worlds – and all of the precarity, darkness and hope within them – bleed into one another.  Like a stock truck filled with live cargo, the story moves inexorably towards its dramatic conclusion: the annual Axeman’s Carnival.

Part trickster, part surrogate child, part witness, Tama the magpie is the star of this story.  Though what he says aloud to humans is often nonsensical (and hilarious with it), the tale he tells us weaves a disturbingly human sense.  The Axeman’s Carnival is Catherine Chidgey and her finest – comic, profound, poetic and true.

4.50 From Paddington (June 2023)

By Agatha Christie

June 8, 2023

After a busy day Christmas shopping in London Mrs McGillicuddy settles into her first-class compartment for a relaxing trip to visit her friend Miss Marple.  Things go awry when she witnesses a murder on a passing train.  She informs the conductor but it is dismissed as the overactive imagination of a middle-aged woman.  Luckily Miss Marple knows Mrs McGillicuddy and that she is not prone to imagining things.

With Miss Marple on the case a ruthless and carefully planed murder will not be let to pass unrecorded.

Come Death and High Water (June 2023)

By Ann Cleeves

June 8, 2023

The picturesque, privately owned island of Gillibry, off the North Devon coast, turns out to be the perfect side for a murder…

A routine weekend visit by the Gillibry Bird Observatory Trust is made memorable by the owner’s announcement that he is going  to sell the island.  A sale would mean the end of the observatory, which, for some of the birders, makes life worth living.  A fire in Charlie Todd’s cottage adds to their distress.  And when, next morning, they find Charlie dead in a bird hide following a fierce storm, their pleasant September weekend assumes a dangerous new face.

Charlie Todd’s murder could have been the deed of any member of the trust.  And it falls to one of their own, George Palmer-Jones to unravel the identity of a killer within their midst…