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Extracts

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The Secrets We Kept

We typed a hundred words per minute and never missed a syllable.

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Wild

Aye, I admit it hadn’t been an easy afternoon for my father, what with the failure of his invention and Mother’s inclination to remind him of it.

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Jack Charles

It’s the middle of the night and I’m huddled over, dragging my dilly bag, which is chock-full with all sorts of goods – jewellery, frozen food, wallets and the like.

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The Pretty Girl Killer

This is the chilling and definitive true story of one of the world’s most extraordinary serial killers, infamous in both Australian and American criminal history.

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Paris and Other Disappointments

The reason I agreed to travel to Europe with my dad was because I was sick of having fun overseas.

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Nottingham

This. This is a man to wear the title of King.

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Silver Sparrow

My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist.

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The Fine Cotton Fiasco

‘Racing’s Darkest Day’. So screamed the headline on Queensland’s Sunday Mail on 19 August 1984, less than 24 hours after Bold Personality’s dismal impersonation of Fine Cotton was rumbled.

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The Turn of the Key

Dear Mr Wrexham, I know you don’t know me but please, please, please you have to help me

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Then She Vanishes

I feel calm as I watch the sun rise behind the row of ice-cream-coloured houses.

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The Second Sleep

Late on the afternoon of Tuesday the ninth of April in the Year of Our Risen Lord 1468, a solitary traveller was to be observed picking his way on horseback across the wild moorland...

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Someone We Know

She’s standing in the kitchen, looking out the large back windows.

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The Cabin

It was three minutes to ten on the morning of Monday 18 August.

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The Warehouse

Well, I’m dying! A lot of men make it to the end of their life and they don’t know they’ve reached it.

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The Family Upstairs

It would be inaccurate to say that my childhood was normal before they came.

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The Nanny

Water closes over the body. Swallows it. The rocking of the boat subsides quickly.

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An Awesome Ride

No parent should have to bury a child. Sadly, I did. I knew almost immediately after Shaun was born that it was just a matter of time.

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The Burnt Country

Afterwards, Kate Dowd believed that if luck had been with her, if Jack had been unable to find his way that night, things would have been different.

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The Inn

Something very bad was about to go down.

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Fake

I’m on the highway a few miles out of town when the noise starts: a scraping, grinding din that jackhammers my heart into my stomach.

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Bowraville

It was only three days after Colleen had gone missing that anybody told her mother, Muriel Craig, and the news made no sense to her.

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Meet Me in Venice

Daisy Benetto blurted out her big idea before it was quite ready.

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Minotaur

Where was I? In bed, obviously. Willow’s bed – that much also obvious. In Willow’s secret hideaway. But where was that?

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The Prettiest Horse in the Glue Factory

My father taught me to kill. In balmy Brisbane nights, on our front lawn and in our backyard, we kill cane toads together.

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