AustLit

'Thirty years had passed since the 1950s and Sandra Rentle knows she is trapped in a fast-fading world of old money and snobbery. Her youthful attempt to evade the expectations of her parents had been nipped in the bud. She had since clung to the memory that she had been offered an escape by an ambitious young man from the margins of the city, far distant from the exclusive suburb of Belvedere. Her marriage to the serially unfaithful Jack had been subtly arranged and dutifully accepted; it had always been loveless. She had come only slowly to realise that Belvedere’s colonial self-certainty had long been little more than a delusion. Her only confidante, her spirited friend Lucy, had asserted her independence. Sandra knew that she too could still do so; she had been promised a new beginning, if only she had the resolve to seek it ...' (Publication summary)

'When Norton Asper, an architect at the top of his profession, forms a relationship with an exceptionally talented, radically alternative young interior designer, his friends are surprised. When she and her lover are murdered and he is found stunned and blood-stained at the scene, the police believe he is the killer. He will say nothing to anyone about his involvement. His silence is of deep concern. His lawyers need to know what has happened...' (Publication summary)

'Art expert Davenport Jones has moved into the heady world of the international art market in London and now works as a senior executive in the old and established firm of Londy's. The novel is a hilarious account of Davenport's passage through his world and his pursuit of a cache of valuable avant-garde paintings by a reclusive Russian master in St Petersburg. On his journey he meets a miscellany of eccentric dealers and beautiful women, and is caught in the cross-fire of a long-standing family dispute.' (Publication summary)

'An Australian patriotic saga which spans two world wars. This novel begins in the rural poverty of the Tweed Valley, where the novel's hero, Charlie Land works as a farm-hand. After World War I, he discards his former love, and becomes involved in the pearling trade, accumulating vast wealth.' (Publication summary)

'A world-famous and wealthy Australian film director, Roderick Lily, lingers on through the unfashionable off-season in beautiful Amalfi near Capri. He has become melancholic. He has left a disquieting mystery behind him in the Gold Coast Studios because he has left his greatest and his final film incomplete. Lily, uncharacteristically, sells an exclusive interview to an illustrated gossip magazine in London for a huge fee. What are his motives? There are scandalous rumours about the bizarre death of his wife on a fashionable Sydney beach decades ago. He now promises that he will reveal the truth about this scandal.

But frustratingly for the young London journo, he first leads her on a tantalizing guessing game through the plots of his major films. He procrastinates, he philosophises. He insists on taking her around historic Herculaneum. In the meantime, the corrupt financiers of Lily’s final film may have hired a hit-man. They will do anything to stop the film being completed and released.

'A near fatal boating accident for Lily and the journo off Sorrento is the trigger for a dramatic crescendo. There is a sudden flashback to the Sydney beach thirty years ago and a horrific scene is re-enacted.

'This is a whodunit with an existential twist in the tail. In the end Callinan creates a drama of illicit love and crippling remorse. Beneath the glittering surface of fame and triumph lurk a fatal error and an unforgiveable sin. There is a justice that is beyond the law and it comes from within.' (Publication summary)

'Written by Ian Callinan a High Court judge from Brisbane, he writes what he knows best in this murder mystery which is set in Sydney and involves murder, obsession, love and failure.' (Publication summary)