2025 HOLIDAY BOOK HAUL!

It is nice to come back from 7 weeks of holidays to find a large pile of review books waiting for you!

Although over 50 review books is probably a bit too much! Especially as I also have a growing pile of advanced Kindle titles and PDFs to read!

Fortunately my colleague at unseenlibrary.com dealt with some of the books while I was away and has already reviewed, or is reviewing, Vikki Petraitis’ The Stolen, Dan Brown’s Secret Of Secrets, Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone In This Bank Is A Thief and Richard Osman’s The Impossible Fortune, and others, for the Canberra Weekly.

Of the crime and thriller novels on display I was particularly pleased to get Mick Herron’s Clown Town, Jane Harper’s Last One Out, Val McDermid’s Silent Bones (not shown) and Garry Disher’s Mischance Creek (not shown), all of which I will be reviewing on this blog and in the Canberra Weekly in the coming weeks.  I have already read electronic copies of the McDermid and Disher books, and both are excellent.

Another three which look very interesting are Chris Blake’s Softly Calls The Devil (more below), Ann Cleeves’ new Jimmy Perez novel The Killing Stones and David Whish-Wilson’s O’Keefe.

Fans of true crime and real life spy stories will also be interested in Stuart Coupe’s excellent looking Saffron Incorporated (which I am already reading and enjoying), Mark Dapin’s The First Murderer I Ever Met and Richard Kerbaj’s account of Oleg Lyalin “the KGB agent who saved MI5 and changed the Cold War”, The Defector.

Of the general fiction books by Australian authors (in the background of the photo), I think that Joanna Nell’s The Funeral Crashers, Tricia Springer’s The Road Trip, Sally Hepworth’s Mad Mabel, will find their ways into reviews for the Canberra Weekly.

I also wanted to quickly highlight three forthcoming books that are heading to the top of my to read list.

Alan Carter is one of my favourite Australian authors and his latest book, Franz Josef (Fremantle Press, November 2025), looks really good. The third book in his series about New Zealand detective Nick Chester, it finds Nick, and his partner Latifa Rapata, investigating a body suspended in the Franz Josef glacier. They soon uncover more victims and a web of international corruption. Carter is very good at linking contemporary international concerns with small town local crimes, and I am very keen to catch up with Nick and Latifa again.

Also set in New Zealand not far from the Franz Josef glacier, is Chris Blake’s Softly Calls The Devil (Echo Publishing, 4 November 2025). Matt Buchanan is the sole policeman at the small, isolated settlement of Haast on New Zealand’s west coast. It is a relatively peaceful job, until Buchanan discovers the body of his predecessor with a bullet in his head. The murder seems linked to an old crime and a local cult that went terribly wrong. Chris is a serving detective in the New Zealand Behavioural Science Unit, and Softly Calls The Devil sounds very promising.

Finally, from the United Kingdom comes the intriguing Quantum Of Menace, (Zaffre, 23 October 2025), by the talented Vaseem Khan. Described as a cosy, spin-off crime series set in the world of James Bond, it follows the activities of Major Boothroyd (better known as Q) who finds himself back in his sleepy hometown of Wickstone-on-Water after being unexpectedly ousted from his role with British Intelligence. His childhood friend, renowned quantum computer scientist Peter Napier, has died in mysterious circumstances, leaving behind a cryptic note. The police seem uninterested, but Q feels compelled to investigate and soon discovers that Napier’s ground-breaking work may have attracted sinister forces. It really sounds like great fun, and I am looking forward to reading it.

I will shortly be doing reviews of the Disher and Jane Harper books, and will also be listing my pick of the books due out before Christmas, and a quick overview of the books I read on holidays.

Happy reading!