Kirjahaku

When a horseman rides into camp, with a bullet hole in his gut and not long for this world, Will Jones finds not only that the dying man has a gang of New South Wales mounted police on his tail, but a canvas-wrapped parcel in his saddle bags. A scrawled address includes the promise of a reward to deliver the package to a station-owner in Western Queensland.With two mates, and an unexpected hanger-on, Will sets out on an adventure across two lawless states in 1880s Australia. Yet, he soon learns that there is a price on his head, and that he is an unwitting tool in a game with mysteriously high stakes.

In the early 1850s everyone knows that the Murray River has potential for river traffic. It takes months for drays to bring stores to isolated stations, and sheds packed with wool bales wait for transport to market. The South Australian government offers a cash reward for the captains of the first two steam-powered vessels to not only arrive at the Murray, but travel upstream to the junction with the Darling. Two men answer the call. The first is William Randell, from Gumeracha. William and his brothers build their fifty-five foot Mary Ann in an Adelaide Hills sawpit, then assemble it on the banks of the Murray, installing a small beam-type steam engine made by a local engineer of German descent. The second man to throw his hat into the ring is Captain Cadell, a sea captain of long experience and a budding entrepreneur with grandiose designs. With the help of wealthy investors, Cadell has his 105 foot Lady Augusta built in a Darling Harbour shipyard, with twin state-of-the-art horizontal steam engines, and accommodation for thirty. Cadell and Randell would both like to be remembered as the founders of Murray River navigation. Both are ambitious and highly skilled in their own way. This is the story of what happens when they pit their skills against each other, and against one of the mightiest rivers on earth.

As a child, Frederick Morton lives with his broken family in a Stepney slum, mudlarking on the Thames riverbank to survive. Through the sponsorship of Lord Bartholomew Forgill, Frederick gains a top-notch education. One night, however, staying at the Forgill residence, he witnesses a distressing incident that will haunt him through the years.At twenty-five, now an engineer in Lord Forgill's steam engine company, Frederick falls for Clare, a young Frenchwoman. Forced to defend his suit with a 300-kilometre trek from Paris to the sea, Frederick discovers a talent for the Victorian-era sport of Pedestrianism.When Forgill's son Percy terminates Frederick's employment, the former slum-dweller establishes his own stationary engine factory, part-funded by prize money from pedestrian competitions. While Percy plots their downfall, the next generation of Mortons travel to Africa and Australia, marketing their innovative engines. The family stakes everything on a public float, while Clare delves into the Forgill family's secrets.The Pedestrian is a journey through another age, seen through the eyes of a family involved in a pivotal industry. It celebrates the power of engineering, explores a fatal rivalry, and condemns the inhuman cycle of intergenerational poverty.

In 1973 Pete Livermore returns from service in Vietnam, and lands a cadetship with the Cairns Post. After months of court reports and sports articles the editor, Brian Grayling, gives Pete a special assignment. Heading north by boat, he lands at a remote Cape York waterway called the Wild Dog River. His job is to write a story on a camp of itinerants, many of them veterans, commanded by a scheming larrikin called Nolan.The initially warm reception soon turns cold, however, and Pete is told to leave. Before he does, a boy offers him the chance to buy a small bronze relic, found in the river's upper reaches, and inscribed with a Chinese triad 'war dragon.' The purchase sets off a sequence of murder, victimisation, incarceration, and ultimately escape.The story delves back a century into the past, to a Chinese 'Red Pole' in the Sheathed Sword Society, and a hoard of gold that was lost en route from the Palmer River Goldfields to China. Pete, on the run from wrongful imprisonment, sets out to clear his name, gathering allies where he can. Every resource will be needed and tested when he faces up to the people of the Wild Dog River, and their lust for a lost treasure.

At the age of fifteen, Charlie left his home in Bendigo and signed on as a drover with Nat Buchanan. Two years later he was a key man on one of Australia's greatest cattle drives - the Durack family's two-year journey from Cooper's Creek, Queensland - to the Kimberley. Stumbling on Charlie's largely unknown story, and filling in the gaps with fiction, the author has created a novel unique in Australian literature. An unprecedented adventure, and a passionate love story - Whistler's Bones is both a celebration of the good things in the settlement of Northern Australia - and a damning indictment of the bad.

When anthropologist Robert Morris arrives at the old Doomadgee Mission, at Bayley Point near Burketown in 1934, he's intent on learning local languages and customs. One very old woman living there, he discovers, was originally from outback New South Wales, and is something of an outcast amongst the Waanyi and Gangalidda locals.On delving deeper, Morris discovers that the old woman was the 'wife' of a white stockman for more than thirty years in the frontier days, and claims to be the mother of one of the north's most notorious outlaws. Determined to record the facts of her son's crimes from her perspective, he sits with her each afternoon.This is the story she told ...

Australian archaeologist Francis da Costa and his Portuguese counterpart, Nicola Massane, follow a trail of relics and myth to a Kimberley valley. Together they unravel the story of a medieval king, a gentle priest, a love story, and a voyage past the edge of the known world.

How can I rest until this story is told? Can I let such a tale slip unnoticed into history? Or allow men to take liberties, inventing lies about that which is precious to me? I, Luis Pereira, Dom Sebastian's friend and confessor, can alone let the truth stand for posterity... Dom Sebastian, the deposed king of Portugal, after losing the battle of Alc cer Quibir in Morocco, flees to the East on board the Nossa Senhora dos Anjos. After months on the ocean, her crew ravaged by disease and starvation, the ship drifts towards Australian shores, pursued by the highly trained guarda-costras, minions of Cardinal Henrique, who has seized the throne.Together with the beautiful Nicol Massane, of Lisbon University, Australian archaeologist Francis da Costa follows a trail of relics and myth to a valley surrounded by cliffs of red stone. Yet, the Kimberley landscape and its people have memories of their own. The past, written in blood on the soil, is deeply malevolent.The medieval and modern threads build towards a shattering and simultaneous climax that will thrill the reader and resonate long after the book is closed.The Last Days of Dom Sebastian is a story of adventure and conflict: a rumination on the darker side of the psyche, and on the unseen marks each of us leaves on the landscape when our time on earth is done.

The second race-against-time thriller from the author of ROTTEN GODS, in the tradition of le Carre, Ludlum and Clancy. Intelligence officer Marika Hartmann captures an extremist foot-soldier guilty of a massacre of school children and aid workers in Southern Somalia. Renditioned to a CIA 'black site' in Djibouti, the prisoner hints at a terror plot in the making. Marika and ex-Special Forces colleague PJ Johnson team up to investigate, uncovering a cold-blooded conspiracy that will decimate the cities of the West. From the refugee camps of East Africa to the azure waters off the Iranian coast, the marshes of Iraq to Syria's parched eastern desert, Savage Tide is a manhunt, a quest for truth, and a desperate search for the legacy of a cruel regime bent on dominating the world. Greg Barron is a world traveller who has studied International Terrorism at the prestigious St Andrew's University. His critically acclaimed thrillers reflect his fascination with political, social and environmental change. Praise for Greg Barron's novels: 'A superlative political thriller' Rob Minshull, ABC 'A high-octane thriller ...the pace is excellent, the writing is sharp and Barron has a real talent for the evocation of place . ..sufficiently gripping to keep you up at night' The Australian 'Barron is not one to pull his punches' Courier-Mail 'Barron echoes the work of authors such as MacLean, Clancy and Ludlum' Canberra Times 'Supremely intelligent and written at breathtaking pace, Savage Tide combines the very best of a thriller by Tom Clancy with the Boys Own action blockbuster of someone like Chris Ryan. The speed of the action is matched only by the sophistication of the prose and the originality of the plot. Greg Barron has proved he is a political thriller writer at the very top of his game.' ABC Weekend Bookworm