2026
1. Sanctuary - Garry Disher - 8/10
Sanctuary is a standalone crime thriller about Grace, a highly skilled thief who has spent years on the run after a life of stealing valuable collectibles like stamps and watches. After a chance encounter with an old associate at a collectors’ event, she realises she must flee yet again. Grace heads to a quiet rural town in the Adelaide Hills and takes a job at a local antiques shop owned by Erin Mandel, hoping for a fresh start and maybe a normal life. But both women have pasts catching up with them, and dangerous men soon begin closing in.
The story follows Grace as she navigates the tension between her criminal instincts and the possibility of finding sanctuary.
Disher is one of Australia’s top crime writers; the story telling is unusual for a thriller in that the principal character is a criminal but you find yourself hoping that she does indeed find sanctuary.
2. Why Are You Here, Mrs Hamilton?: The Post Office Scandal and My Extraordinary Fight for Justice - Jo Hamilton - 9/10
After the ITV drama of a couple of years ago, there can hardly be anyone in the UK who hasn’t heard about the Post Office / Horizon scandal.
This book is the personal account/ordeal of Jo Hamilton, one of the UK sub-postmasters caught up in the scandal. Hamilton recounts how the Post Office’s faulty Horizon accounting system revealed unexplained shortfalls in her branch accounts, leading to her being wrongly accused, prosecuted (and convicted), and financially ruined despite never taking any money.
She describes remortgaging her home, borrowing to try to cover false deficits, and questioning her own sanity under pressure. Beyond her personal ordeal, the memoir explores the wider impact of the scandal on hundreds of sub-postmasters, the fight to clear their names, and the strength of community and resilience in seeking justice.
Although I had been aware of the scandal for a numbers of years, largely through Private Eye, I don’t think that I truly appreciated the scale of the issue until the TV programme; the TV drama is necessarily a broad brush telling of the story, but this book is a comprehensive telling of one person’s story and brilliantly describes the anxiety, despair, and powerlessness she felt over many years, when the discrepancies kept coming and fear of the inevitable exposure. I was amazed at how many years the story covered and it's only recently that she has settled her case.
I listened to the Audiobook, read by Monica Dolan, who played Jo Hamilton in the TV drama and I think that it was all the more powerful because of this.
