Both keys slid in unopposed. Both locks operated first time – lifting the heavy lid took all of Lee’s strength.From inside the box the accumulated wealth of twenty years stared up at him. Though he had seen it a hundred times before, under that yellow glare from his cap lamp the buttery glint of raw metal took his breath away.For over two decades, the Goddards have struggled through the uncertainties of war, political upheaval and now, faced with mounting pressure from a corrupt government, they are forced to make decisions that will change their lives forever. As Managing Director of the Empress Deep gold mine, Lee Goddard rolls into play the final ball of an already dangerous game.Fostered by rampant avarice and political uncertainty, life in Zimbabwe is worthless – only the elite survive. For a fortune in gold and tribal treasures, some are willing to sell the very soul of an emergent country.

    Her long dark auburn hair cascaded over her shoulders and her pale, attractive face, wide set eyes and full sensuous lips took his breath away. Robert could not help staring at her in frank amazement. He found it difficult to equate this alluring woman with the tall, awkward girl he vaguely remembered while a young boy at Fairlee Manor in Scotland.* * *Action, adventure and erotic entanglements loom large in young Robert Hamilton’s future as he seeks to make his fortune in the rough and tumble world of the Johannesburg goldfields in the closing years of the nineteenth century.Robert’s business interests and adventures in the wilds of South Africa, bring him into close contact with the Boer peoples of the Transvaal Republic. As the threat of a British invasion looms large over the country, his support for the Boer cause finds him on the opposing side to his fellow uitlanders – foreigners. He is dismayed to discover that both of his brothers have enlisted in Canadian regiments ready to fight on the side of Britain in the Anglo-Boer War.

    What he lacked in experience and expertise, he made up for in enthusiasm. Or so he hoped.When the family arrived on a lonely hill in northern New South Wales, they had no electricity, no running water, no telephone and no choice but to make that tangle of bush their home. From Angela Wales, eldest of the five kids, comes this extraordinarily vivid and evocative account of the next ten years as they tried to tame six thousand acres and navigate the challenges of country life.Filled with drama and hilarity, joy and back-breaking toil, Barefoot in the Bindis portrays a childhood spent in the bush, and is a sensational picture of Australia past.

    Part of the Australian Federal Police's K block, a unit doing whatever it takes in order to stop terrorist attacks on home soil. But when young Muslim men on the Terror Watchlist start turning up dead, Sid and his partner, Haifa, have to work out what's going on. Sectarian war? Drugs? Retribution? For Sid, there's nothing unclear about a bullet to the head and a severed hand. Someone is sending a message. Deciphering that message reveals a much wider threat and Sid and the agency have to decide just how far they'll go to prevent a deadly attack. Time is running out ... for them and Australia. From the brutal battlegrounds of Afghanistan, to the western Sydney suburbs and the halls of power in Canberra, THE LIST is a page-turning thriller where justice, revenge and the war on terror collide.

     The unputdownable action thriller from Australia's no.1 true crime writer.Riley Jax, convicted murderer. Once a promising engineer in the army, he lost everything in a single night when he killed a man - an act he cannot remember.It's a devastating gap in an otherwise perfect memory.Now he's facing a new life, one behind bars, where he has to learn a whole different set of rules and only the toughest survive.And as a series of deadly bombings rocks the outside world, the only man who might be able to find the truth behind the conspiracy ... is on the inside.

    A knife-edge CIA operation that goes wrong. And a vengeful mujahideen tribesman, armed with Stinger missiles. When CIA officer Joe Johnson is handed the tough task by his boss of capturing a Soviet helicopter and forging better contacts among the mujahideen, he unknowingly finds himself up against a sinister KGB rival who wants him dead. But after coming under fire, Johnson comes to suspect that his difficulties stem not just from the Soviets—but from a traitor on his own side. To extricate himself from the web of deceit in which he finds himself, Johnson comes to rely on a female colleague from Britain’s MI6, Jayne Robinson, to whom he grows unexpectedly close. As pressure mounts on Johnson from CIA headquarters at Langley and politicians in Washington, DC, the story reaches a climax during a life-or-death shootout in Jalalabad. The Afghan , set in 1988, is a thriller that forms a compelling prequel to the Joe Johnson series as a whole. It also creates the backdrop for book four in the series, Stalin’s Final Sting , set in Afghanistan, New York City, and Moscow in the present day. Meet Joe Johnson today and read how he uncovers dark secrets.

    After everything she's been through, Georgia knows she deserves someone like him, to make her feel loved. Safe.The only problem is his ex-girlfriend. Luke says Cadence is having trouble accepting their break-up, but Georgia thinks there's more to the story. She also has the feeling someone is watching her.When everything starts to go wrong at work, at home, in her old friendships and her happy new relationship with Luke, Georgia starts to feel truly afraid.Cadence wants what she has. What would she do to get it?And can Georgia trust anyone at all? Praise for Nicola Moriarty 'I devoured it' Marian Keyes 'Accelerates in intensity and sheer originality with every page' Australian Women's Weekly 'Dramatic, mysterious and compelling' Vogue

    Brutally murdered. Eyelids surgically removed.Their killer never caught.Eighteen years later… a new victim is found.Carolina McKay thought she’d escaped her past. The murders that wrecked her youth. Her family. But most of all, her hometown.After her promising career as a big-city police detective is ended by a gunshot, Carolina heads home to Dupray, West Virginia, defeated and purposeless.Until the murders start anew. Sheriff Lester Fenech, her mentor and surrogate father, feels old and outmatched. With less than a month until his retirement, he’s desperate to solve the case which has tormented him. But he needs help. When the first killings rocked Dupray, Carolina was just a teenager. Now, she’s the best chance they have to catch a monster.Will she be able to pull herself together and solve the murders? Or will her own haunted past get in the way and leave more dead bodies in a killer’s wake?A page-turning thriller packed with twists and suspense. Fans of Willow Rose, Patrick Logan, Karin Slaughter, and Lisa Gardner will love Carolina McKay.

    Clark. Hiding from the law, they never expected to be caught in the crosshairs of a hunter… After relocating to South Africa on the heels of scandal five years ago, Chloe and her invalid father, Mike, once wealthy Zimbabwean landowners, now have little. Away at university, Chloe has had to rely on her father's best friend Enoch and his son Xo to watch over Mike. When a violent confrontation puts Chloe in danger, Enoch steps in to help – with inadvertent fatal results. With increasing pressure from a right–wing group on the police to charge Enoch, this mismatched family have no choice but to flee back to Zimbabwe. But crossing the border will be dangerous and near impossible with their route taking them amid warring dissident armies and landmines, and their every footstep is stalked by a shadowy ring of hunters – whose trophies are taken from more than animals...Only with help from Nick, formerly a soldier under Mike's command, now a professional game ranger, will the fugitives have a chance of making it home. But Nick has long struggled to come to terms with his fellow soldiers' choices before their unit was abandoned. Will his past demons put them all at risk?

    The spate of cold, methodical attacks has the city on edge, but the serial killer may not even be the darkest player in this story.Desperate for a breakthrough, decorated homicide detective David Murphy draws into the case his art historian sister, Joanna, and his wife, Sylvia. Unravelling the mystery of who is behind the killings pushes each beyond the limits of what they thought possible.The Tribute is a subversive take on modern masculinity and misogyny told through an irresistible crime narrative. Dark and unpredictable, chilling but sympathetic, it weaves a tapestry of narrative threads towards a mesmerizing climax that will challenge the way you think about everyone you meet. Meticulously researched, hugely ambitious and superbly crafted, The Tribute is the most outstanding crime novel of 2021.

    But as questions mount, Falk is forced to probe deeper into the deaths of the Hadler family. Because Falk and Luke Hadler shared a secret. A secret Falk thought was long buried. A secret Luke's death now threatens to bring to the surface in this small Australian town, as old wounds bleed into new ones.

    Twenty-six years earlier, Sammy Went, a two-year old girl vanished from her home in Manson, Kentucky. An American accountant who contacts Kim is convinced she was that child, kidnapped just after her birthday. She cannot believe the woman who raised her, a loving social worker who died of cancer four years ago, crossed international lines to steal a toddler.On April 3rd, 1990, Jack and Molly Went’s daughter Sammy disappeared from the inside their Kentucky home. Already estranged since the girl’s birth, the couple drifted further apart as time passed. Jack did his best to raise and protect his other daughter and son while Molly found solace in her faith. The Church of the Light Within, a Pentecostal fundamentalist group who handle poisonous snakes as part of their worship, provided that faith. Without Sammy, the Wents eventually fell apart.Now, with proof that she and Sammy are in fact the same person, Kim travels to America to reunite with a family she never knew she had. And to solve the mystery of her abduction—a mystery that will take her deep into the dark heart of religious fanaticism where she must fight for her life against those determined to save her soul…

    A double life – a single truth.May 1991. Fresh out of uniform, DC Jimmy Bliss finds himself at the centre of an undercover sting. Enlisted by a crew of villains to crack a safe, he fears his cover is blown when he’s seen in the wrong place at the wrong time.But on the night of the job, things run smoothly enough until the gang leader changes the location of the heist. As the job spirals out of control, Bliss has to trust his instincts and buy some time. There’s just one problem: he has no idea if his team know what has become of him.As the situation escalates, Bliss finds himself at the mercy of a violent criminal who will do anything not to be caught.

    Even back then, she was a mystery that I wanted to solve.The lead homicide investigator in a rural town, Detective Sergeant Gemma Woodstock is deeply unnerved when a high school classmate is found strangled, her body floating in a lake. And not just any classmate, but Rosalind Ryan, whose beauty and inscrutability exerted a magnetic pull on Smithson High School, first during Rosalind's student years and then again when she returned to teach drama. As much as Rosalind's life was a mystery to Gemma when they were students together, her death presents even more of a puzzle. What made Rosalind quit her teaching job in Sydney and return to her hometown? Why did she live in a small, run-down apartment when her father was one of the town's richest men? And despite her many admirers, did anyone in the town truly know her? Rosalind's enigmas frustrate and obsess Gemma, who has her own dangerous secrets—an affair with her colleague and past tragedies that may not stay in the past.

    A year later, troubled journalist Martin Scarsden arrives in Riversend to write a feature on the anniversary of the tragedy. But the stories he hears from the locals about the priest and incidents leading up to the shooting don't fit with the accepted version of events his own newspaper reported in an award-winning investigation. Martin can't ignore his doubts, nor the urgings of some locals to unearth the real reason behind the priest's deadly rampage.Just as Martin believes he is making headway, a shocking new development rocks the town, which becomes the biggest story in Australia. The media descends on Riversend and Martin is now the one in the spotlight. His reasons for investigating the shooting have suddenly become very personal. Wrestling with his own demons, Martin finds himself risking everything to discover a truth that becomes darker and more complex with every twist. But there are powerful forces determined to stop him, and he has no idea how far they will go to make sure the town's secrets stay buried.A compulsive thriller that will haunt you long after you have turned the final page.