My BOOKS

Harvest

Remote Australia, 1916. Stella Winterson wants nothing more than to be with Jasper Reynolds but she is thwarted at every turn by her father’s tyrannical rule. When her father banishes her to an isolated guest house without Jasper knowing, the young man recklessly enlists to fight in the Great War, Stella devastated when she hears of it.
   Engrossing and heartfelt, Harvest reveals the extraordinary impact war has on the lives it touches. Fortunes twist and turn on the home and battle fronts, and tragedies hit hard. As Jasper witnesses the horror of the Western Front, Stella’s intended punishment reveals an unlikely friendship. Meanwhile tensions are ignited among the local townsfolk who struggle with loyalty to their country when faced with losing a generation of young men.
   Brilliantly executed and seamlessly written, Harvest is the ultimately uplifting story of finding love and courage in the depths of despair, and of harnessing the strength to never give up on who or what you believe in.

Mosquito creek

Huge floodwaters have engulfed a remote Victorian goldfield, reducing the prospect of digging up a fortune from very slim to impossible, and adding disease to the many possibilities of sudden death in harsh conditions. As sickness starts to take its toll and calls mount for the rescue of diggers stranded by the raging torrent, Sergeant Niall Kennedy must try to keep order in a place where frictions can become murderous. Does a suspiciously abandoned tent suggest there has already been a killing? And why has Mosquito Creek's erratic Commissioner Stanfield drafted in special troopers behind Kennedy's back? In a new country where everyone's past has a question mark, asking too many questions is dangerous. But how else can you get to the truth?

‘Enthralling’
Good Reading

‘Engwerda’s novel offers a gripping and multifaceted exploration of the influences of the past ... In many ways, a book about masculinity’.
Australian Book Review

‘A gripping drama of how a group of colonials interact when they are either trying to escape, conceal or move beyond their past. Mosquito Creek is a place of secrets and lies, like the rest of Australia in its formative years’.
Daily Telegraph

‘Tense and entertaining, sometimes relentlessly so ... A rollicking tale of deceit, water and a great deal more’
Adelaide Advertiser

the summertime dead

When a teenage girl and boy go missing from Mitchell everyone has a theory about what happened to them. Most in town think they’re runaways. Others suspect their families or marijuana growers as rumours and gossip abound in the orchards and farms of Victoria’s northern plains. But when the brutally murdered teenagers’ bodies are discovered in an isolated paddock a fortnight later, the town’s attention quickly turns to its itinerant, summertime population and to the dead girl’s boyfriend, Lee Furnell.
   It’s 1966 and times are changing, even in rural Victoria. Bob Dylan is on the radio, Elvis Presley on the television. But change doesn’t sit comfortably with everyone in Mitchell and the arrival and brash methods of Detective Gene Fielder and his two junior detectives from the Melbourne Homicide Squad raises temperatures inside and outside the local police station. For Fielder is out for a quick end to the case when there’s little evidence to support his belief that Furnell is the killer. And when his suspect doesn’t confess, Fielder steps outside of the law to get Furness where he wants him.
   Fielder’s methods stand in stark contrast to those of Mitchell’s police, led by Senior Sergeant Lloyd Cole and Sergeant Terry Holloway. Cole is methodical, practical and mindful of local sensibilities. For him there is no obvious suspect and in having to deal with the abrasive Fielder tensions soon begin to run high.
   As Cole and Holloway grapple with Fielder and a vexed investigation they and their wives, Nancy and Audrey, have their own battles to fight. Cole’s vice is gambling; for Nancy it’s drinking. Audrey Holloway feels trapped in a loveless marriage while her husband is cornered by something much more sinister. When they’re all under pressure the stress of the murder investigation turns their lives upside down. And for one couple their relationship will end in the worst possible way.
   While Cole confronts his personal and professional challenges and quietly gathers his clues, the force Fielder applies to his only suspect becomes the spark for another tragedy, inflaming feelings in the town and further escalating the ill-feeling between him and Cole.
   It then becomes a race against time for Cole. And how does the spate of home burglaries and nocturnal thefts in town and the earlier disappearance of another girl four years earlier fit in with his investigations? What at first seems confusing, gradually takes shape as the clues Cole has been looking for begin to emerge.

whistle down the wire

On a wet winter’s night in 1967, Harry and Dianne Colston are killed when their car collides with a freight train near the town of Mitchell. But from the outset Senior Sergeant Lloyd Cole suspects it might be more than just a tragic accident.
   Making his way through heavy rain to the Colstons’ property later than night, he finds the disturbing sight of a toddler left home alone. He phones Harry’s sister, Linda Fantasio, who arrives and takes possession of the child. But something about her strikes him as being off-putting, and not quite right.
   Cole soon enlists the help of his new constable, Christine Sheridan, in revisiting the accident scene. There they see signs that only reinforce Cole’s suspicions about the crash.
   With few obvious clues to go on, however, Cole begins investigating the dead couple’s past and discovers that more than a few people had an axe to grind with the Colstons. Untangling the farmer’s messy dealings leads him to neighbouring landholders with their grievances, horse and cattle traders, the town’s illegal bookmaker and his sidekicks, as well as to the wealthy Kinross family. But buried deepest in the Colstons’ affairs is Harry’s hairdresser sister and his wife Dianne’s down at heel family. When Harry’s will surfaces and makes no mention of his child, everything left instead to Fantasio and Dianne's family, Cole is convinced something is wrong.
   But as he tries to tease apart the mystery he is hindered on discovering his new constable is getting too close to one of their suspects. And that he can’t trust his station staff to keep their mouths shut. He soon realises the investigation is his and his alone.
   As Cole digs deeper into the Colston mystery he finds family pitted against family, and sees that money drives everyone’s ambitions. An attack aimed at him personally blows away any idea he might have had that the Colstons’ deaths were accidental.
   But the reasons behind the Colstons’ deaths are more complicated than Cole first thought, and don’t belong just to the present. The more questions he asks, the more he understands that the Colston family has secrets buried deep in the past.
   But answers don’t give themselves up easily. Was the motive for the Colston killings financial or personal? And was Harry or Dianne the real target? And who had the strongest motive of all for wanting them dead?
   When the past reaches out to strangle the present, and Cole finally understands the truth about how and why the Colstons died, he uncovers the most shocking revelation of all.

guy fawkes night

It’s 1968 and times are changing, not always for the better. And especially not for the charred body found buried in the smoking ruins of the Sandpiper reception centre where the local football club has just held its end of year celebrations.
   As police officers Lloyd Cole and Christine Sheridan probe the suspicious death they uncover disturbing evidence about the dead man’s dark practices. And with it the number of suspects pile up.
   There’s the Sandpiper’s owners, Mark and Gary Weaver, Mark Weaver’s jealous girlfriend, corrupt shire councillors, Henderson the fruit shop owner, the backers of the Early Settlers housing estate, local farmer Tito Cavallo and marijuana-growing orchardists.
   Then there’s the dead man’s own murky past in wartime Yugoslavia.
   The investigation comes to a head on Guy Fawkes Night as more fires erupt, including one that engulfs a suspect linked to the Sandpiper fire.
   But as Cole and Sheridan untangle the mystery even they aren’t prepared for the shocks that are finally revealed.

backwaters

Backwaters tells the story of Tom Lakeman at three crucial times and places in his life. In the first part, Tom is at primary school. His troubled father abandons the family and Tom himself commits a minor act of thieving that indirectly leads to the accidental death of another boy, his friend Stephen, the child of Italian migrants and the target of a bullying nun. Tom believes that if he had owned up to the theft, Stephen would still be alive.
   As an adult, he discovers that the ripples of childhood spread far into adulthood and envelop him in ways he’d never imagined possible. In the second part, Tom is now a schoolteacher with a wife and young family. He has been troubled all his life by his father’s disappearance, and by the events surrounding that disappearance. He is drawn to Christine, a lonely teaching colleague. They take a party of boys to a local swimming hole, leave their charges for a time to make love, and learn later that a boy has drowned. What follows is an echo of Stephen’s death, and Tom feels the whole world closing in on him.
   In the novel’s final section, Tom and his wife and children drive to a beach house for the summer. This is a period of reassessment for him — he puts some ghosts to rest, and with the help of his strong and loving wife he begins to discover that it is possible to unshackle yourself from the past.
   Backwaters is a novel about love and loss, and of betrayal and redemption. It ultimately shows that there is a way back from tragedy.

after september 11

A celebration of the human spirit and of rising above adversity

After September 11 is a moving novel about loss and recovery, and finding a way forward even when the world appears to be crumbling around you.
   Against the backdrop of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Jack struggles to accept that his wife, Stephanie, has been diagnosed with cancer. Faced with the prospect of losing her and caring for their eleven-year-old daughter Alice on his own, he stumbles.
   As Stephanie bravely fights her illness she tries to map out a future for her husband and daughter. But surgery and treatments prove fruitless. When her brother and sister-in-law arrive to provide support Jack is suspicious of their motives. A tug of war ensues for Alice’s affections with Jack determined not to lose her, even as his daughter’s rebellion erupts. In the midst of this upheaval he receives another blow that shakes him to his core.
   Despite his troubles, Jack inches his way forward until he and Alice forge a closer bond. Together they learn to rebuild their lives, accepting the past while looking expectantly to the future in an uplifting finale.
   This contemporary novel explores the emotional minefields within families and the ways lives can be repaired after trauma.

Praise for After September 11:
After September 11 is a quiet gem, a beautifully written novel portraying the deeply felt sensitivities of a man who is negotiating relationships with the women in his life – his dying wife, his daughter and, finally, a new lover. Ultimately, as if he has worked through the AA’s 12 steps of reparation and recovery, he emerges from grief to form a strong emotional bond with his daughter and to begin a new relationship without guilt or self-recrimination.
Irina Dunn, Director, Australian Writers’ Network