eBook Listing

A gripping adventure story based on real historic quests for the priceless buried treasures of ancient Egypt.

How do you lose an army of fifty thousand without a trace?

Napoleon's invasion of Egypt turned into a treasure hunt with ancient sites plundered to enhance France's museums and palaces. When, in 1799, Napoleon learned his position in Egypt was untenable due to the British blockade, Bonaparte ordered that the best gold and jewel encrusted loot be buried to be retrieved at a later date. In 1805, when the political situation allowed, Bonaparte organised a large caravan to set out in secrecy with armed escort into the Great Sand Sea, south of the Siwa Oasis to recover the treasure and transport it back to France. The entire caravan marched into oblivion, swallowed by a fierce sandstorm and lost without trace in a sea of burning sand.

Since then, others such as the memorable team of Carter and Lord Carnarvon have attempted to uncover the hidden secrets beneath the sands of Egypt and adventurers and amateurs have sniffed around like bloodhounds to uncover leads and pay locals for information. Negotiations were carried out with intrigue and clandestine deals to thwart rivals.

It is against this factual historic background that the two main characters of this story embark on a journey from Prague to Cairo and through the Sahara to the remote oasis of Siwa to fulfill a promise, to solve a mystery and avenge their uncle's murder.

Saeed has not returned to Iran after publishing his novel The Imaginary Narrative of a Real Murder for fear of political persecution. He is surprised when Ismael, his father who has never left Iran, announces that he is travelling to Adelaide to visit him. During his short stay, Ismael tells Saeed the story of his unrequited love for Forugh Farrokhzad - the most controversial poet of modern Iran. The story makes Saeed see his father in a new light, and leaves him with the burning question: had his father, unwittingly, played a role in Forugh's death?

Perth cop Eve Rock is investigating a series of abductions from the seedy inner-city Paradise Nightclub when her boss adds a murder case to her workload.

Now, Eve loves a challenge - about as much as she loves red wine, exotic food and cigars - but this case is a bit tricky because she'd speed dated the sleazy salesman hours before he met his Maker.

But then 'tricky' is Eve's middle name.

Her mum's a former hooker-turned-nun who runs a select girls school.

Her daughter's a fanatical 'Virgin Vigilante' who attends that same school.

And Eve is being stalked by a department store Santa.

If that isn't enough, her love life is dead in the water.

Or it is until Eve meets dreamy undercover cop Adam Fox whose sex appeal isn't diminished by his slut heels and micro skirt.

And then there's his equally gorgeous dad...

Eve's life could be peachy... except now someone wants to kill her.

Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt is peaceful and prosperous under the dual rule of the Pharaohs Amenhotep III and IV, until the younger Pharaoh begins to dream new and terrifying dreams.

Ptah-hotep, a young peasant boy studying to be a scribe, wants to live a simple life in a Nile hut with his lover Kheperren and their dog Wolf. But Amenhotep IV appoints him as Great Royal Scribe. Surrounded by bitterly envious rivals and enemies, how long will Ptah-hotep survive?

The child-princess Mutnodjme sees her beautiful sister Nefertiti married off to the impotent young Amenhotep. But Nefertiti must bear royal children, so the ladies of the court devise a shocking plan.

Kheperren, meanwhile, serves as scribe to the daring teenage General Horemheb. But while the Pharaoh's shrinking army guards the Land of the Nile from enemies on every border, a far greater menace impends.

For, not content with his own devotion to one god alone, the newly-renamed Akhnaten plans to suppress the worship of all other gods in the Black Land.

His horrified court soon realise that the Pharaoh is not merely deformed, but irretrievably mad; and that the biggest danger to the Empire is in the royal palace itself.

 

A romantic night at the zoo ends with a new mystery for milliner and sleuth Catherine Kint.

Before you can say 'monkey business' Catherine and her trusted barman Boris are annoying everyone from zoologists to police. This investigation would challenge the best of detectives, but this is Catherine and Boris.

Secrets, rivalries, lust and egos all set the dung flying. By the time this is finished, reputations will be tarnished, gin will be drunk and someone's gonna get fed to the lions... or some other carnivore.

The bumbling and eternally famished Grafton Everest appointed as the first Australian Secretary-General of the United Nations? A secret game of Australian Rules football skilfully played by Tutsis and Dinkas in a tiny African state?
In this novel our hapless hero reaches the culmination of his haphazard career. Despite Grafton’s fervent hope that it will be a purely honorary position, he finds himself forced to actively head an organisation not only made ineffective by its Byzantine organisation, but threatened by a deadly conspiracy within its own ranks.
Our woebegone world leader not only endures attempted kidnappings and assassination but finds that a mysterious young woman who has been assigned to write his biography is possibly not who or what she seems. On top of this unwanted intrigue, Grafton discovers that, despite having no desire to save the world, or anything else, he is an essential part of a plan, implemented by a rough-edged Australian diplomat, to avert a looming global disaster – a plan which, strangely, seems to involve Australian Rules football.

‘Pandemonium is a work of comic brilliance, a perfect consummation of the uproarious Grafton Everest series’ – Nigel Marsh, Smart, Stupid Sixty
‘Grafton Everest is a wonderful creation whom I would place without question in the ranks of Phillip Roth’s Portnoy and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim.’ – Barry Humphries

Panthers and the Museum of Fire is a novella about walking, memory and writing. The narrator walks from Glebe to a central Sydney cafe to return a manuscript by a recently-dead writer. While she walks, the reader enters the narrator's entire world: life with family and neighbours, narrow misses with cars, her singular friendships, dinner conversations and work. We learn of her adolescent desire for maturity and acceptance through a brush with religion, her anorexia, the exercise of that power when she was powerless in every other aspect of her life.

 

'It is not too much of a stretch to compare Jen Craig's work with the otherwise incomparable WG Sebald.' - Debra Adelaide

 

'...the reader is made aware at once that Craig is a writer of great skill.' - Kerryn Goldsworthy

 

Jen Craig's short stories have appeared in various Australian literary magazines. She collaborated with composers of the chamber opera, A Dictionary of Maladies, in Switzerland in 2005.

Seen through the eyes of an illiterate twelve-year-old boy, Nava Semel's moving, at times lyrical fiction explores life in the Palestine of the 1930s - a world where a young Jew is prepared to undertake multiple marriages to threatened East European women for patriotic reasons alone; where a boy's closest friends are a dog named after his hero Johnny Weissmuller (the screen Tarzan of blessed memory), his brother's first wife, and the girl next door. Semel weaves a rich evocation of love and pain and promises, written with eloquent humanity and verve.

Homicide Detective Inspector Michael Ballard is vigorously resisting retirement; not wishing to walk away from continuing to serve society by investigating and solving complex criminal cases.

The brutal murder of a factory owner has him and his partner applying their 'old school' policing skills to hunt down the killer.

But while Ballard is hunting the killer - is the killer hunting him?

An absorbing murder mystery set in the often violent world of modern day law enforcement.

A prominent brewery tycoon in Lincolnshire has a beautiful 16-year-old daughter, Baroness Penola Bloomfield, who goes to a fortune teller because she admires the young officer who has moved into the estate next to her father's. The gypsy warns her there is trouble ahead due to an indiscretion.

 

Penola is sent to the Colony of Australia as a convict, incurring extreme hardship during a very slow voyage: rape, pregnancy, starvation and eventually shipwreck before giving birth to a son while unconscious on the beach.

 

A whaling ship takes her to Hobart. A judge who wants to marry her has her released into his custody. The judge's sister wants a baby from the relationship but his brother does not want a child from a convict girl in the family. The brother wants to kill her but plans rape by a native African, at gunpoint.

 

Penola escapes, meets Captain Bligh who gets her out of trouble, she then continues to Sydney on a well-known whaling ship. She has massive drama in Sydney: murder, marriage, court case, and then finds her shipwrecked child... that's only the half of it, now read the book.

In Permission to Lie, Julie Chavalier casts a curious eye into many different worlds. Her characters ride the citybound bus route, spend the night in a nudist colony and wait tables. Quirky and beautifully-written, these stories provide insights that ring with integrity and compassion.

'A new voice in Australian fiction, wry, gritty, knowing and true.' - Fiona McGregor

Blarney and Alex Pike, husband and wife network marketers for American-based Argo, become embroiled in a menacing predicament when their American friend and fellow networker Jack Sussoms is murdered in the Czech Republic. The situation quickly escalates into a melting pot of murder, graft, corruption and terrorism, the scale of which Blarney and Alex have only just begun to uncover... Can Blarney and his skilful friends save the day?

The first novel in a series of four gripping crime thrillers that feature heroic crime buster and family man, Blarney Pike, and his talented companions in the remote but extraordinary town of Stanley, Tasmania.

Pirates aren’t supposed to get lovesick, but that’s what’s happened to Dread Pirate Captain Louis, master of the good ship Boattega.

 

Unaware he’s already stolen the dread pirate's heart, Captain Montgomery Montgomery, ambitious head of the anti-piracy task force and woke af, is intent on reforming the sexy bad boy.

 

What happens next includes a shocking lack of boundaries, inexperience in love, a bitey pet possum, mermaids that won't leave and then kind of do, and the promise of Spanish treasure untold.

 

And pirate booty. A lot of pirate booty.

 

And isn't that the REAL treasure?

What if justice isn't enough?

 

Schalk Lourens got out his phone and started filming, something Pieterse taught him years ago. Keep a record. Do it yourself, boykie, every time. That way you can be sure. Cover your arse. Don't trust any of them.

 

Schalk began with Pieterse himself, what was left of him.

 

 

Retired police chief Piet Pieterse has been murdered, necklaced in fact. A tyre placed round his neck, doused with petrol, set alight. An execution from the apartheid era and one generally confined to collaborators. Who would target Pieterse this way, and why now?

Veteran copy Schalk Lourens is trying to forget the past. But Pieterse was his old boss and when Schalk is put on the case, he finds the past has a way of infecting the present.

Meanwhile, it's an election year. People are pinning their hopes on charismatic ANC candidate Gideon Radebe but there's opposition and in this volatile country, unrest is never far from the surface.

Schalk must tread a difficult path between the new regime and the old, between the personal and the professional, between justice and revenge.

This investigation will change his life, and could alter his county's future.

 

"A truly remarkable book. South Africa comes to vivid life in these pages." - Kerry Greenwood

 

"A gripping story of murder, revenge and betrayal set in the new South Africa." - Malla Nunn

A journalist who travels the world exposing heinous crimes makes enemies. Olivia Wolfe has more than most.

 

When her anonymous source is murdered, Wolfe must unravel the terrible secret that connects a British Cabinet Minister, a Vietnamese billionaire, and a poor South African teacher to a series of gruesome murders.

 

Soon Wolfe is hunted by a terrifying assassin. With governments in the balance and the survival of one of the most magnificent creatures on earth in her hands, can Wolfe stay alive long enough to expose this shocking conspiracy?

 

Four murders. Four countries. One terrible secret.

 

'In Larkin, Michael Cirichton has an heir apparent' - The Guardian

'Larkins's fast action style is accompanied by impressive research' - The Times

'Action and intrigue in spades' - Peter James