Murder at the Castle: A Miss Merkel Mystery, by David Safier

Angela Merkel makes her fictional debut as village sleuth in this good natured cozy crime series.

Angela Merkel, ex-German Chancellor, has retired to the rural village of Klein-Freudenstadt (“little happy town”). After years of gruelling public service, she’s looking forward to creating a new life for herself with husband Achim and their little pug, Putin. As the couple make tentative steps to merge with the local community, attending wine festivals and markets, they find themselves at the centre of a murder mystery. Baron von Baugenwitz, owner of the village castle, has been found slumped over a table dead in the dungeon. Angela, who is used to solving problems, can’t resist this one, despite the need for her to keep a low profile due to her political past. As the mystery proceeds, a cast of suspects is introduced: an angry ex-wfie, an angry current wife, a surly, wise-cracking daughter, a cop, a far-right fruit seller and a tour guide. Danger is ever present, however, and Angela must evade an angry killer who knows she is on their tail.

Murder at the Castle is the first in a cozy crime series by German author David Safier. Readers may wonder how credible a fictionalised Angela Merkel would be, but Safier does an admirable job of creating a likable yet slightly offbeat ex-Chancellor. The novel is mostly an affectionate portrait of a devoted middle-aged couple, structured around a classic whodunnit. The plot is interwoven with plenty of humour, references to Merkel’s political career and some 18th century German history. All up, a warm hearted, entertaining frolic.  

Translated by Jamie Bulloch

Murder at the Castle: A Miss Merkel Mystery, by David Safier. Published by HarperCollins. $32.99

August 2025

The Hollow Girl, by Lyn Yeowart

Editor and novelist Lyn Yeowart returns with a highly addictive new thriller. 

It’s 1961, regional Victoria. Near the city of Horsham is Harrowford Hall, a notorious and shame ridden home for girls who find themselves pregnant out of wedlock. It’s run by the tough-as-nails Matron, Mrs Denise Montague. She has little sympathy for her charges, and treats them to Dickensian conditions. One of her sidekicks, nurse Stella Chapman, is equally hard on the girls. When fourteen-year-old Jane McEvoy becomes pregnant, her mother has a meltdown and at their doctor’s recommendation, sends her off to Harrowford Hall. The adults hope the whole affair can be covered up with some concocted story about visiting a sick relative and no-one need ever find out about the pregnancy. But Jane’s life soon turns into a living hell. 

Fast forward to 1973 and nurse Stella Chapman’s body is found. She’s been murdered, just days before Harrowford Hall had closed its doors for good. Detective Sergeant Eleanor Smith, on her first murder case in which she has to prove her capability to her misogynist supervisor, is assigned to the case. But as events unfold it turns out not to be a single murder that needs solving, but a pandora's box of secrets and lies. 

Lyn Yeowart’s follow-up to her acclaimed debut thriller, The Silent Listener, is a brilliant page-turner that maintains its atmosphere of suspense and dread right up to the very end. The plot is expertly designed like a ticking time bomb, with breathtaking twists and turns. Based on extensive research and first-person testimony, it’s also an angry indictment on the appalling treatment of young women in the past and the culture of misogyny that enabled it. The seriousness of the book’s themes is leavened with some comic moments, notably the dialogue between hardboiled Detective Eleaonor Smith and her novice assistant constable.

A stunning thriller that also addresses outrageous historical wrongs. 

The Hollow Girl, by Lyn Yeowart. Published by Penguin. $34.99

August 2025

The Usual Desire to Kill, by Camilla Barnes

Two daughters must deal with their eccentric, aging parents.

Dutiful daughter Miranda has her patience stretched trying to keep an eye on her aging, rather eccentric parents. They moved to rural France years ago and now live on a run down mini farm. The house is in a terrible state and they live on dodgy food from the freezer. Her sister Charlotte, with whom Miranda has a rocky relationship, endeavours to help out. Even so, Miranda confesses to the “usual desire to kill” both her mother and father. 

The Usual Desire to Kill is Camilla Barnes’s debut novel (she is the niece of famed British writer Julian Barnes.) What she presents here is a totally original take on dealing with elderly parents (the novel mostly circles around the mother’s pending hip replacement operation.) Barnes opts for an innovative structure, with the novel written in the first person, interspersed with email correspondence and an earlier exchange of letters between the mother and her mystery friend, Kitty. The great joy of the book is Barnes’s pitch perfect dialogue between the idiosyncratic parents, which many a reader will recognise. A life affirming novel written with warmth and love, despite the protagonist’s parricidal fantasies.

The Usual Desire to Kill, by Camilla Barnes. Published by Scribner. $35

July 2025

Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work, by Sarah Wynn-Williams

The inside story of Facebook from a former employee.

​A former New Zealand diplomat with extensive experience in international affairs, Sarah Wynn-Williams early on saw that as Facebook expanded globally, it would find itself in moral and political trouble. She envisaged a role for herself in helping Facebook navigate these perilous waters and made a pitch to its leadership team. Her ideas and vision didn’t impress at first, but the times would soon suit her, and a position was eventually offered. 

Wynn-Williams started work at Facebook in 2011 and would eventually become the company’s global public policy director. The position would take her around the world to many important summits, hobnobbing with business leaders and prime ministers. Careless People, a memoir of her six years at Facebook, is notable for its coruscating portraits of former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. She also claims that her supervisor, Joel Kaplan, sexually harassed her over many years. 

In the author’s telling, Facebook had an expand-at-all-costs culture that had little to no regard for the harm it caused, turning a blind eye to the help it indirectly gave authoritarian regimes. A gripping if stomach-turning read on corporate greed and how power deranges.

Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work, by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Published by MacMillan. $36.99

July 2025

The Image of Her, by Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir published her final novel Les Belle Images (“Beautiful Images”) in 1966, and it was translated into English in 1968 by Patrick O’Brian. It is here given a new translation by Lauren Elkin and a reworked title, The Image of Her.

Laurence works as a copywriter, promoting products that make middle class life comfortable. She has a near perfect husband and two young daughters. While there is some friction caused in her personal life by having a lover on the side, this is resolved without too much drama by calling the whole relationship off. All should be well, but something keeps niggling at Laurence, a dreadful feeling of impending doom. At one point she wonders if she will always have this feeling of “stones in her chest and sulfurous clouds in her head.” She watches wars on the television and reads about disasters in newspapers while safely cocooned at home. It doesn’t seem right, but such is the communications technology of modern life. While Laurence tries to keep her emotional boat from capsizing, she finds trouble brewing in her family. Her mother, Dominique, is having trouble with her second husband. He has decided to leave her for a younger woman, causing Dominique to go into a full meltdown. And closer to home, her ten-year-old daughter, Catherine, has confessed to feeling despair at the state of the world. Her husband insists on therapy for their daughter as a stock standard response, but Laurence feels differently, in the end quite vehemently, that despair is the only rational response to the world.

Written in crystal clear prose and superbly organised, Simone de Beauvoir triumphs in creating the literary version of a panic attack. We watch as the protagonist, Laurence, feels herself slowly swallowed up and suffocated by life’s cruelty and carelessness. Friends and family tax her emotionally with their suffering, while she  hopelessly tries to forge her own path ahead, to escape their folly. At one stage she thinks her easy-going, philosophical father is the model to emulate, but she ultimately finds his peace of mind is built on illusions and self-deceptions.   

Wonderfully absorbing, and written with a genius’s uncanny gift, The Image of Her is a rare literary experience.

The Image of Her, by Simone de Beauvoir. Published by Vintage. $34.99

June 2025

The Passengers on the Hankyu Line, by Hiro Arikawa

 

A steady stream of strangers straighten out their lives while travelling the Hankyu Train Line.   

In the author’s preface to Hiro Arikawa’s The Passengers of the Hankyu Line, we learn that Hankyu is a private railway that services the area around Kyoto in Japan. Arikawa concentrates her story on the Imazu Line, a lesser known line within Hankyu. A loose collection of characters bump into and interact with each other as they commute on the line, sometimes their fates coming to intertwine. 

Shoko is dealing with the grief of being a jilted bride. Misa, a student, is having trouble with her violent boyfriend. Tokie and her granddaughter discuss the merits of getting a dog. Kei’ichi in an accidental encounter meets Miho and the two tentatively move towards a relationship. Yasue, a housewife unhappy with her friendship circle, decides to step back from their expensive outings and lunches to concentrate on her family. 

First published in 2008 and now translated into English by Allison Markin Powell, The Passengers on the Hankyu Line is a gently written novel about everyday lives and where they intersect in public places. If there’s a theme, you could say it’s the kindness of strangers. Sometimes people behave badly in public - there are scenes of loud school girls and boisterous women grabbing seats - but in the long run humanity tends towards kindness and loving relationships. 

A pleasurable, companionable read that will make you feel that despite life’s troubles, all is good with the world.

The Passengers on the Hankyu Line, by Hiro Arikawa. Published by Doubleday. $34.99

June 2025

Pernickety Boo, by Sally Gardner

A talking umbrella with magic powers finds his forever home.

When a muddle-headed wizard unwittingly bungles a spell, he brings to life an umbrella. Pernickety Boo - a talking dog’s head attached to an umbrella canopy - finds himself abandoned by the forgetful wizard to a lost property depot. He languishes there for several years until he meets Sally Moonshine, a young girl who takes an immediate liking to Pernickety Boo. He moves in with Sally and her two Mums, meeting several interesting characters along the way, notably the cat Jimjam and a horse named Crackers. Pernickety and Sally experience many adventures, especially once Pernickety figures out how to use his time travelling skills. But danger looms when brattish Billy Turpin decides he wants Pernickety Boo for himself.

Best selling children’s author Sally Gardner has written a winning story full of whimsy and clever nonsense. Think Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. All of the novel’s interlocking parts shouldn’t really work - a talking umbrella that even the adults see as perfectly normal, talking cats that performed as circus acts in previous lives, plus a host of other absurdities - yet Sally Gardner has the magic touch and creates a bubbly, effervescent tonic out of this seeming chaos. 

A book sure to delight young and old readers alike. 

Pernickety Boo, by Sally Gardner. Published by HarperCollins. $19.99

June 2025