Jane Harper is a first-rate writer. She's very adept at turning the tension like a tourniquet without compromising charaterisation or plot. An equal to Stephen King on this aspect of the craft.
A corporate team building weekend in the forests outside Melbourne ends in tragedy, one of the team has gone missing and another is rushed to hospital with a snake bite. It's further complicated by the missing person helping Aaaron Falk investigate white-collar corruption at the company they work for.
As the story unfolds, Harper cleverly weaves office politics, gender politics, and parenthood past and present in a tight plot with plenty of twists and turns where everyone has a reason for the missing person (Alice) never to return.
The gripping new novel from the author of the Sunday Times top ten bestseller, Waterstones Thriller of the Month and Sunday Times Crime Book of the Year, The Dry.
FIVE WENT OUT. FOUR CAME BACK...
Is Alice here? Did she make it? Is she safe? In the chaos, in the night, it was impossible to say which of the four had asked after Alice's welfare. Later, when everything got worse, each would insist it had been them.
Five women reluctantly pick up their backpacks and start walking along the muddy track. Only four…
There are few authors that can match King when he's on form & this novel like 11,22,63 is a welcome return to form. Eric Clapton, the blues musician, was asked once how he kicked heroin and remarked part of the process involved being hooked up to a black box and given electrical impulses.
King runs with this idea and weaves a tale of how a local pastor, Charlie Jacobs befriends a young boy, James Morton in a small town. Jacobs has a fascination with electricity and when he suffers a tragedy, he becomes a healing preacher who takes a revival on the road.
Morton becomes a musician and lives the high life, becoming an addict. The two men meet, Morton is healed but in all Faustian pacts, what appears miraculous comes with a heavy price. As their paths cross year after year, Morton discovers that Jacobs has a plan for the ultimate electric shock and sets out to stop it.
A superb book that allows the characterisation to grow and like a great Hitchcock movie, only releases the horror in well-placed junctures.
A spectacularly dark and electrifying novel about addiction, religion, music and what might exist on the other side of life.
In a small New England town, in the early 60s, a shadow falls over a small boy playing with his toy soldiers. Jamie Morton looks up to see a striking man, the new minister, Charles Jacobs. Soon they forge a deep bond, based on their fascination with simple experiments in electricity.
Decades later, Jamie is living a nomadic lifestyle of bar-band rock and roll. Now an addict, he sees Jacobs again - a showman on stage, creating dazzling 'portraits in…
Rich in historical detail – The Bloodless Boy is simply one of the best novels I have ever read. The growing interest in science as well religion and its internal conflicts during Charles II's reign are the backdrop to a series of murders involving young boys.
The clash of reason, faith, power, and enlightenment drive the investigation and London is realised perfectly by Lloyd's prose.
It's the written version of Joseph Wright of Derby, "A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery" (from 1766).
A New York Times Best New Historical Novel of 2021
"Potent... fast-paced..." - The New York Times Book Review
"Wonderfully imagined and wonderfully written . . . Superb!" -- Lee Child
Part Wolf Hall, part The Name of the Rose, a riveting new literary thriller set in Restoration London, with a cast of real historic figures, set against the actual historic events and intrigues of the returned king and his court …
The City of London, 1678. New Year’s Day. Twelve years have passed since the Great Fire ripped through the City. Eighteen since the fall of Oliver Cromwell and…
The man standing at the funeral in bubble-gum pink hair is P.J. Crowe. His career as a detective is in tatters – he's facing dismissal, vilified by the press and his wife's about to leave. Lying low in a small seaside town he spots a ‘Help Wanted’ ad in the kitchen of a local café. It offers him an escape from the public and his spiralling mental health – and it's where Thea Farrell worked – until she was found dead at sea.
And herein lies the problem: Thea was an Olympic medallist, silver for swimming and Crowe’s burned-out synapses are starting to join the dots – it wasn't his case, but his cop’s senses tell him that Thea wasn’t the drowning kind. And the suspect may well be in the congregation.
