This week’s fiction features an almost entirely Australian line-up, while non-fiction books range from political cartoons to interviews with world leaders’ chiefs of staff.

FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

Murder on North Terrace
Lainie Anderson
Hachette, $32.99

Set in Adelaide during WWI and inspired by a real historical figure, Lainie Anderson’s Petticoat Police Mysteries follow trailblazing women in the police force. Woman Police Constable Kate Cocks and her offsider, Woman Police Constable Ethel Bromley, have two brutal crimes to solve in the second instalment. A director of a major art gallery has been found murdered, the body dumped under a controversial nude painting that’s caused moral outrage and drawn record crowds. Blue-blooded Ethel is well-placed to investigate a headline-grabbing murder that seems to involve Adelaide’s elite. Meanwhile, the indomitable Miss Cocks must handle a no-less-savage crime – the rape of a schoolgirl – that won’t make the newspapers. Indeed, it will certainly go unnoticed and unavenged unless this severe teetotaller can navigate Adelaide’s seedy underworld, with her trusty cane in hand, to find the culprit. Murder on North Terrace is immersive, well-researched period detective fiction – up there with Kerry Greenwood’s beloved Phryne Fisher novels – featuring a pioneering crime-fighting duo whose contrasting methods and personalities add drama and social complexity to each mystery they tackle.

Mischance Creek
Garry Disher
Text, $34.99

At the opening of Mischance Creek, Senior Constable Paul Hirschhausen patrols his vast, drought-stricken beat in the South Australian outback. His current task is an admin-heavy chore: checking and auditing firearms to ensure people’s guns are registered and safely stored. So Hirsch is glad of the distraction when he’s called for roadside assistance by a woman, Annika Nordrum, whose car’s stuck in a ditch. What he thinks will be a simple matter of bailing out an ill-prepared tourist turns into a more compelling mystery, however, when he discovers that Annika has come to the outback to search for her mother, missing for seven years. Maybe the cold case will turn hot. The usually laid-back Hirsch senses a simmering threat during the search for local no-hoper Trent McRae, who seems to have been drawn into the sovereign citizen movement. If Hirsch has some sympathy for anti-government sentiment in a jurisdiction where basic services are neglected, the fringe ideology poses a lethal danger to decent rural cops like him. Garry Disher’s popular rural crime series retains its winning mix of heart and harsh reality.

Eggshell
Olivia De Zilva
Espresso, $24.99

Another South Australian setting, this time one of the rougher suburbs of Adelaide in the 2000s, where Kira is about to embark on year 12. The narrator of Olivia De Zilva’s YA novella is Chinese-Australian and finds herself torn between a sense of obligation to her family, especially her Cantonese grandmother (who wants her to grow up and marry someone of the same ethnic background), and a desire to fit in with her friends. Kira lives in a council house and views problem students at her rough-as-guts state school through a sharp-eyed, cynical lens. But she’s also a typical teen with an encyclopaedic enthusiasm for 2000s pop culture, experiencing the first stirrings of romantic and sexual desire. De Zilva writes with sarcastic wit, emotive punch and refreshing directness, holding a mirror to kids from impoverished backgrounds as well as migrant ones, and tackling themes of identity, love and death along the way. True, this schooldays novella may resonate more with 30somethings – as a nostalgic reminder of their coming of age 20 years ago – than with adolescent readers now, but it’s the work of a talented writer worthy of wider attention.

Last One Out
Jane Harper
Macmillan, $24.99

Last One Out is the latest from Jane Harper, author of The Dry – a novel that did as much as anything to make outback noir a 2020s global publishing phenom (on par with Scandi noir in the 2000s) – and it doubles down on Gothic atmosphere, possessing a sapping, life-denying force, an all-pervading despair that anticipates murder more surely than any foreknowledge of violent demise. For Ro Crowley, whose son Sam vanished five years ago, an annual pilgrimage back to Carralon Ridge proves a suffocating but necessary ritual. With only a few footprints in the dust to remember him by, her grief led Ro to leave husband Griff and the remote coal mining town where they lived. The community itself is dying. Its population dwindles with each new cut to the coal mine, and although Ro has little hope of finding Sam, alive or dead, there’s something her old friends aren’t telling her. Answers lurk under grim silence but grief and rage can’t be suppressed forever. If the actual crime plot here isn’t as compelling as Harper’s previous books, the sinister atmospherics and characterisation should keep fans satisfied.

Remain: A Supernatural Love Story
Nicholas Sparks with M. Night Shyamalan
Sphere, $34.99

This collab between a master of romance and a doyen of supernatural thrillers seems destined for a film, as I suppose any work that boasts Nicholas Sparks and M. Night Shyamalan as its authors would be. A New York architect recently released from a psychiatric facility, Tate Donovan is still raw with grief at the death of his sister Sylvia and he remains confounded by her deathbed confession that she can see lingering spirits of the departed. A project designing his best mate’s holiday house in Cape Cod might be just what he needs to stop him ruminating. When he meets the beautiful young Wren he feels a deep and unexpected sense of connection. Romance feels inevitable but it’s soon clear that this idyllic setting is seething with small-town malice. As dramatic events unfold, Tate must uncover a mystery that will forever upend his rationalist worldview and make him see life, death and love with fresh eyes. Billed as Ghost meets The Sixth Sense, the novel does feel derivative and too safe a play, somehow, despite these big-name authors having plenty of runs on the board.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

Heart of Ice
Joy McCann
NewSouth, $34.99

In his most recent book Robert Macfarlane pondered the question “Is a river alive?” Joy McCann ventures into similar territory, contemplating the ice of Antarctica as a life force that drives the seasons and rhythms of the planet. While human interaction with Antarctica is part of the story, McCann takes us beyond this anthropocentric perspective to explore the “inner life” of glaciers and sea ice. “In the early 20th century, the ice sheet had seemed a vast, timeless landscape on which humans inscribed their stories. By the end of the century, it had become clear that the ice sheet has stories of its own to tell.” Out of the ice archive come glimpses into the Earth’s past and what the future could hold for the creatures that live in this cryosphere, from minute diatoms and krill to orcas and penguins. This journey into the heart of ice melds a historian’s bird’s-eye view with scientific precision in evocative prose that dissolves the boundaries between the human and the non-human world.

Hostage
Eli Sharabi
Swift Press, $34.99

When he was dragged from his home in the kibbutz where he lived next to Gaza on October 7, 2023, Eli Sharabi was buoyed by the fact that at least his wife and two daughters were left behind. During the early period of his abduction by Hamas terrorists Sharabi was kept in a family home. Here, he was provided with fresh clothes, toiletries and decent food. Bonds began to form between him and his captors. It wasn’t Stockholm Syndrome, he says; it was all about survival. Later, the conditions deteriorated, as did Gaza. He was taken to a series of tunnels where he was kept with other Israeli captives, adopting a fatherly role with one of the younger ones. Sharabi is an acute observer and his account of his 491 days in captivity captures the horror, despair, hunger, daily grind and character of his captors largely without judgment – a fact made all the more remarkable by his discovery, upon release, that his wife and daughters were murdered by Hamas.

Best Australian Political Cartoons 2025
Edited by Russ Radcliffe
Scribe, $35

A fortune-teller says to her colleagues: “I used to rely on my crystal ball but these days I just make up the craziest shit I can think of and 95% of the time I’m totally on the money.” Fiona Katauskas’ cartoon, which opens this collection, perfectly sums up the madness of 2025. Donald Trump looms large as the epicentre of the maelstrom. David Rowe’s apocalyptic vision of the Statue of Liberty with Trump’s face declaring, “Take back your tired, your poor, your huddled losers …” is particularly poignant. Locally, Peter Dutton and the Coalition provide better fodder than Labor. Alan Moir’s prescient take on the Liberal election post-mortem has Sussan Ley, as pathologist, asking for a scalpel. Half a dozen knives fly through the air in her direction. On the recognition of Palestine, Cathy Wilcox nails the projection in Netanyahu’s attack on Anthony Albanese by showing the Israeli PM looking in the mirror as he makes his claims about weakness and betrayal. If you want to get to the pith of the past year without feeling overwhelmed, this collection is a fine place to start.

Circus Oz: From the Pram to the World Stage
Jesse Jensen-Kohl
Melbourne Books, $59.99

It was born amid the political ferment of the ’70s as the love child of a collectivist theatrical group, a student circus troupe and a Melbourne jug band. Crucial to the egalitarian ethos of the emergent Circus Oz was the creation of an ensemble in which no one was billed as the “star”. As Jesse Jensen-Kohl observes, Circus Oz captured the zeitgeist of a self-confident, liberated generation breaking down traditional barriers between sex, class, work and family life. Success came quickly; at the end of their first year they were invited to tour Europe, where they were hailed as inventing a new, “punked-up” kind of circus. This colourful history follows the company from the early days, when they performed in a hand-made tent, to the headquarters where they now reside in Collingwood, charting the tension between their roots and the need to evolve with the times.

The Right Hand
Phoebe Saintilan-Stocks
Penguin, $36.99

For Phoebe Saintilan-Stocks, interviewing world leaders’ chiefs of staff was like being Dorothy’s little dog, Toto, in The Wizard of Oz: she got to pull back the curtain to reveal who had their hands on the controls. While it’s an imperfect metaphor that conflates the COS with their boss, and suggests that the leader is little more than a puppet, it does capture the largely invisible role of the COS and how they wield power behind the scenes. Among the line-up are those who worked for leaders such as Tony Blair, Julia Gillard, Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern. The highlight is Nelson Mandela’s COS, Barbara Masekela. Mandela’s all-female team called him ‘tata’ – father – but he was like their child in his innocence, having been isolated from the world for so long while in prison. Saintilan-Stocks sheds light on how female COS, in particular, have worked to demystify the role, make it more family-friendly and emotionally intelligent. For anyone interested in the dynamics of leadership, The Right Hand is an invaluable read.

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