Recent Books

The Dead of Winter (April 2023)

By Stuart MacBride

April 18, 2023

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 Victoria 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…

Homecoming (April 2023)

By Kate Morton

April 18, 2023

Adelaide Hills: Christmas Eve, 1959:

At the end of a scorching hot day, beside a creek in the grounds of a grand country house, a local man makes a terrible discovery.  Police are called, and the small town of Tambilla becomes embroiled in one of the most baffling murder investigations in the history of South Australia.

Many years later and thousands of miles away.  Jess is a journalist in search of a story.  Having lived and worked in London for nearly two decades, she now finds herself unemployed and struggling to make ends meet.  A phone call summons her back to Sydney, where her beloved grandmother, Nora, who raised Jess when her mother could not, has suffered a fall and is seriously ill in hospital.

At Nora’s house, Jess discovers a true-crime book chronicling a long-buried police case: The Turner Family Tragedy of 1959.  It is only when Jess skims through its pages that she finds a shocking connection between her own family and this notorious event – a murder mystery that has never been satisfactorily resolved.

An epic story that spans generations, Homecoming asks what we would do for those we love, how we protect the lies we tell, and what if means to come home.  Above all, it is an intricate and spellbinding novel from one of the finest writers working today.

Someone Else’s Shoes (April 2023)

By Jojo Moyes

April 18, 2023

Meet Sam …

She’s not got much, but she’s grateful for what she has: a job she’s just about clinging on to and a family who depend on her for everything.  She knows she’s one bad day away from losing it all – and just hopes today isn’t it…

Meet Nisha …

She’s got everything she always dreamed of – and more: a phenomenally rich husband; an international lifestyle; but … she’s just been locked out of all of it after her husband initiates divorce proceedings…

Sam and Nisha should never have crossed paths.  But after a bag mix up at the gym, their lives become intertwined – even as they spiral out of control.

Each blames the other as they feel increasingly invisible, forgotten, lost, and desperately alone.

But they’re not.

No woman is an island.  Look around.  Family.  Friends.  Strangers.  Even the woman you believe just ruined your life might turn out to be your best friend.  Because together you can do anything – like take back what is yours …

P.S. Come to Italy (April 2023)

By Nicky Pellegrino

April 18, 2023

“Come to Italy, come for sunshine, and pasta, and red wine and long walks, come for as long as you like…”

When Belle’s quiet, idyllic life on the coast starts to crumble, it’s a stranger – thousands of miles away in Italy – who provides a shoulder to cry on.  And so, when Enrico sends her a beautiful gift with a note signed off “P.S. Come to Italy!” she decides to follow her heart.

Arriving at Enrico’s palazzo in beautiful Puglia, it’s clear that his life couldn’t be more different than the one Belle’s left behind.  Yet despite his flashy cars and his glamorous, warring family, she starts to realise that perhaps Enrico needs her just as much as she needed him.

Belle’s holiday of a lifetime was never about falling in love – but under the sun-kissed olive trees, anything can happen…

Cold People (April 2023)

By Tom Rob Smith

April 18, 2023

For a moment it was as if the whole sky was full of campfire embers that swirled among seagulls distressed at the commotion but otherwise unharmed.  And then the beaches were empty, the parks were empty, the freeway and pier were empty, the seagulls were calm again and the only people left alive on the planet were those who had reached Antarctica.

The World Has Fallen.

Without warning, a mysterious and omnipotent force has claimed the planet for their own.  There are no negotiations, no demands, no reasons given for their actions.  All they have is a message: humanity has thirty days to reach the one place on Earth where they will be allowed to exist … Antarctica.

Cold People follows the journeys of a handful of those who endure the frantic exodus to the most extreme environment on the planet.  But their goal is not merely to survive the present.  As they cling to life on the ice, the remnants of their past swept away they must also confront the urgent challenge: can they change and evolve rapidly enough to ensure humanity’s future?  Can they build a new society in the sub-zero cold?

Find You First (March 2023)

By Linwood Barclay

March 7, 2023

It’s a deadly race against time …

Tech billionaire Miles has more money than he can ever spend, and everything he could dream of – except time.  Now facing a terminal illness, Miles knows he must seize every minute to put his life in order.  And that means taking a long hard look at his past.

Somewhere out there, Miles has children.  And they might be about to inherit both the good and bad from him – possibly his fortune, or possibly something more sinister.

So Miles decides to track down his missing children.  But a vicious killer is one step ahead of him.  One by one, people are vanishing.  Not just disappearing, every trace of them is wiped.

BOX 88 (March 2023)

By Charles Cumming

March 7, 2023

Years ago, a spy was born …

1989: The Cold War will soon be over, but for BOX 88, a top secret spying agency, the espionage game is heating up.  Lachlan Kite, recruited from an elite boarding school, is sent to France, tasked with gathering intelligence on an enigmatic Iranian businessman implicated in the Lockerbie bombing.  But what Kite uncovers is more terrifying than anyone expected …

Now he faces the deadliest decision of his life …

2020: MI5 hear rumours of BOX 88’s existence and go after Kite – but Iranian intelligence have got to him first.  Taken captive and brutally tortured, Kite has a choice: reveal the truth about what happened in France thirty years earlier – or watch his family die.

In a battle unlike anything he has faced before, Kite must use all his skills to stay alive.

The Beloved Girls (March 2023)

By Harriet Evans

March 7, 2023

‘It’s a funny old house, Janey.  They have this ceremony every summer … There’s a chapel, in the grounds.  Half derelict.  The Hunters keep bees in there …’

Catherine, a successful barrister, vanishes from a train station on the eve of her anniversary.  Is it because she saw a figure – someone she believed long dead?  Or was it only a shadow cast by her troubled, fractured mind?

The answer lies buried in the past.

It lies in the events of the hot, seismic summer of 1989, at Vanes – a mysterious West Country manor house – where as a young girl, Janey, arrives to stay with the gilded, grand Hunter family, and where a devastating tragedy will unfold.  Over the summer, as an ancient family ritual looms closer, Janey falls for each member of the family in turn.  And she and the eldest daughter of the house will forge a bond which later, is still shaping the present …

Paris Never Leaves You (March 2023)

By Ellen Feldman

March 7, 2023

The war is over, but the past is never past …

Paris, 1944.  Charlotte Foret is working in a tiny bookstore in Nazi-occupied Paris struggling to stay alive and keep her baby Vivi safe.  Every day they live through is a miracle until Vivi becomes gravely ill.  In desperation, Charlotte accepts help from an unlikely saviour – and her life is changed forever.

Charlotte is no victim.  She is a survivor.  But the truth of what happened in Paris is something she knows she can never share with anyone, including her daughter.  Can she ever really leave Paris behind, and embrace the next chapter of her life.

Seamlessly interweaving Charlotte’s past in wartime Paris and her present in the 1950s world of New York publishing, Paris Never Leaves You is a heartbreakingly moving and unforgettable story of resilience, love – and impossible choices.

A Necessary Death (March 2023)

By Anne Holt

March 7, 2023

The Snow is Falling

Selma Falck is living a nightmare.  Trapped in a burning cabin on a freezing snow-covered mountain.  She has no idea where she is or how she got there.  Bruised, bleeding and naked, she barely makes it out in time as the flames engulf the cabin.  With no signs of human habitation nearby, the temperature rapidly dropping and a blizzard approaching, how will she survive?

She’s Lost in the Wilderness

As Selma fights the cold, the hunger and her own wounds, she eventually forms a frightening picture of the past six months.  Not only does she have to find a way to stay alive, she needs to make it back to civilization, quickly.  Murder has been committed and a great injustice must be stopped.  The very future of the nation itself is at stake …

If the Cold Doesn’t Kill Her,