On a cold Sunday evening in 1957, Sarah Dewhurst and her father wait in the parking lot of the Chevron Gas Station for the dragon Gareth hired to help on the farm. Their encounter with Kazimir — a rare, enigmatic blue dragon — ignites a world-ending chain of events they have no hope of aborting; for this is their destiny. This is fate.
Blending the epic with the intimate, Patrick Ness has crafted a novel of exquisite escapism. He weaves new religions, histories and conflicts into an action-packed, character-focused romp, teeming with rogue FBI agents, a cruel xenophobic deputy sheriff, dragons (of course) and a teenage assassin; and that’s only the start of its stunningly diverse cast.
Burn has the propulsion of a thriller — its two grand action scenes are masterpieces of excitement and stomach-clenching tension — and the earnestness of the very best tales of young romance. Ness is a brilliantly nimble writer, able to flick between blockbuster moments and personal with peerless grace. It’s the stuff of literary magic.
ISBN: 9781406375503
Number Of Pages: 384
Available: 7th May 2020
Publisher: Walker Books Ltd
Somehow Meg Gardiner manages to take stock suspense plots — a dedicated and relentless FBI behavioural analyst pursuing an ingenious serial killer — and dress them up into the kind of pulse-pounding, irresistibly readable thrillers you can’t help but in inhale in one sitting.
The New Girl — the nineteenth Gabriel Allon thriller by genre stalwart (and personal favourite) Daniel Silva — is a gripping, fast-moving and intelligent spy novel that negotiates the geopolitical fautlines of the Middle East, as the head of Israeli intelligence is compelled to aid the heir to the Saudi throne to negotiate the release of his kidnapped daughter.
I’ve whined before about a distinct absence of “metropolitan cops” in this new age of Australian crime fiction. Los Angeles has Bosch. Edinburgh has Rebus. Quebec has Gamache. Galway has Reilly. New Orleans has Robicheaux. Once upon a time, Sydney had Cliff Hardy and Scobie Malone. Melbourne had Jack Irish. But the notion of the quintessential city detective seems to have faded. Australian crime fiction has turned its focus to our harsh landscape. Geography has become king. And used to great effect. But where are the stories that flip the coin, and tackle our big cities? Here’s one — Katherine Firkin’s debut, Sticks and Stones.
Powerful and raw, harrowing and unsentimental, incredibly ambitious yet tightly focused in its scope, Your House Will Pay confronts the legacy of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when the city exploded into violence after four white police officers were acquitted of any wrongdoing in the beating of Rodney King. Laced with tension and suspense, Steph Cha’s novel proves the past is prologue as it probes the residual pain, rage and grief felt by two families almost 30 years after a young black girl named Ava Matthews was shot to death by a Korean woman, who mistakenly believed the girl was stealing from her convenience store; an adaptation of the real-life murder of Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old black girl fatally shot by convenience store owner Soon Ja Du, who was sentenced to five years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $500 fine.
This team-up between two of thriller-lit’s most enduring creations — Lee Child’s Jack Reacher and Karin Slaughter’s Will Trent — is exactly what you’d expect it to be; nothing more, nothing less. Our heroes meet, inside Fort Knox, and become instant foes, before quickly forming a partnership that enables them to take on some bad dudes, and uncover a criminal ring operating inside the famous United States Army post. It’s bread and butter stuff from Child and Slaughter; a fun short-story-length aside, with an interesting connection to Reacher’s debut adventure, Killing Floor, with some amusing banter between the two leads, but ultimately, it reads more like a trailer for a full-size adventure we’re never actually going to see in print.
This opener to a new series set in Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne universe — now 15 novels deep thanks to Eric Van Lustbader — sees a former Treadstone operative (the organisation that created Bourne) yanked back into the violent world he thought he’d left behind when he receives a foreboding email from a former colleague, and is soon after attacked by a kill squad.