The Exchange
John Grisham. Hachette Australia. $34.99.
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What became of Mitch and Abby McDeere after they exposed the crimes of Memphis law firm Bendini, Lambert and Locke and fled the country? In this sequel to Grisham's 1991 breakout bestseller The Firm, set 15 years later, Mitch and Abby are living in Manhattan, where he is a partner at the largest law firm in the world. When a mentor in Rome asks him for a favour that will take him far from home, Mitch finds himself at the centre of a sinister plot that has worldwide implications - and once again endangers his colleagues, friends and family.
Alex Cross Must Die
James Patterson. Penguin. $32.99.
When an American Airlines plane explodes in the sky, detectives Alex Cross and John Sampson are first on the scene. They don't hear the gunfire. At first. It soon becomes clear that the plane was taken down by a rare, stolen machine gun. The list of people who could operate the weapon is short. And time runs even shorter. But this isn't the only case the pair must solve. They're also tracking a serial killer who's ambushing young men in what the media are calling the "Dead Hours" murders. This is the 31st instalment in the Alex Cross series.
The Year of the Locust
Terry Hayes. Penguin. $34.99.
If, like Kane, you're a Denied Access Area spy for the CIA, then boundaries have no meaning. Your function is to go in, do whatever is required, and get out again - by whatever means necessary. But some places don't play by the rules. Some places are too dangerous, even for a man of Kane's experience. The badlands where the borders of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan meet are such a place. Kane travels there to exfiltrate a man with vital information for the safety of the West - but instead he meets an adversary who will take the world to the brink of extinction.
A Country of Eternal Light
Paul Dalgarno. HarperCollins. $22.95.
Margaret Bryce, deceased mother of twins, has been having a hard time since dying in 2014. These days she spends time with her daughters - Eva in Madrid, and Rachel and her family in Melbourne - and her estranged husband, Henry, in Aberdeen. Mostly she enjoys the experience of revisiting the past, but she's tiring of the seemingly random events to which she repeatedly bears witness. There must be something more to life, she thinks. And death. But why is facing up to what's happened in one's past as hard as, if not harder than, blocking it out completely?
A Woman I Know
Mary Haverstick. Scribe. $36.99.
Independent filmmaker Mary Haverstick thought she'd stumbled onto the project of a lifetime - a biopic of a little-known aviation legend whose story seemed to embody the hopeful spirit of the dawn of the space age. But after she received a mysterious warning from a government agent, Haverstick began to suspect that all was not as it seemed. What she found as she dug deeper was a darker story - a story of double identities and female spies, a tangle of intrigue that stretched from the fields of the Congo to the shores of Cuba, from the streets of Mexico City to the dark heart of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.
Big Mouth: A Memoir
Matt Preston. Penguin. $34.99.
Preston is best known as one of the judges on MasterChef Australia. But there's a lot more to his life than that. Here he writes about his adoption, his fractured childhood and family tragedies and his disastrous spell in the British Army. He talks about his misspent youth and burgeoning journalistic career in 1980s London, to relocating to the other side of the world and finding love. And, of course, he talks about food, from the exquisite to the dreadful, and how he wound up on MasterChef Australia, where he would remain for 11 years.
The Last Charge of the Australian Light Horse
Peter FitzSimons. Hachette. $49.95.
At dusk on October 31, 1917, 800 men and horses from the Australian Light Horse stormed the town of Beersheba, taking it from the Turkish forces. That battle is just one of the many stories told in this account of the Australian Light Horse, who went from Australia to Egypt to Gallipoli to fighting in the desert. Among the people who pass through are Lawrence of Arabia, Major Banjo Paterson and the warhorse with the name Bill the Bastard. All these - and more - have their part to play in the saga of the Australian Light Horse.
Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths
Matthew Lamb. Penguin. $45.
Frank Moorhouse created a huge and diverse body of work - essays, short stories, journalism, scripts, the iconic Edith Trilogy. He was an activist, intellectual, libertarian and champion of freedom of speech and sexual self determination. Though he lived his life publicly, his private stories have not been shared, the many paths he forged left unexamined, until now. Lamb knew Moorhouse and immersed himself in the archived life and cultural ephemera of Frank's world. This landmark study, from Moorhouse's own publisher, the first in a projected two volumes, is the story of how one of Australia's most original writers and pioneer of the discontinuous narrative came to be.
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