Extracts

When Adelaide Nightingale, Louisa Worthington, Maggie O’Connell and Pearl McCleary threw caution to the winds, disgrace was bound to follow.

The night her mother died, Maggie Rowe drove back through the quiet streets

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who leave home, and those who don’t.

It’s getting dark, and the little girl is cold.

It is nearly dawn, and the semi-darkness casts strange shadows along the footpath.

The girl was found seventy-six hours after she was reported missing.

It’s just another evening of horrors.

The girl’s head rested on a small pile of orange-and-brown leaves.

Their high-pitched squealy calls come first.

According to the statistics, on this last day of the year a man of eighty-five has approximately an 80 per cent chance of reaching 31 December 2015.

The house he’s building is done mostly.

‘What’s your intro, then?’ That’s what my news editor used to ask me as soon as I walked into the office.

A dozen men clad in bright orange coveralls and white hardhats swarmed the decks of CGSL Orion, the 396-meter flagship of China Global Shipping Lines, like ants.

It was the moustache that reminded me I was no longer in England

These days the origin of the universe is explained by proposing a Big Bang, a single event that instantly brought into being all the matter from which everything and everyone are made.

‘By the time you find yourself, there’ll be nobody home!’

On the rare occasions Claire allowed herself a stroll down memory lane, Scotty Shannon was always her destination.

I bounded over the gray, dusty terrain toward the huge dome of Conrad Bubble.

Max woke with a start as the car crunched to a halt.

From inside a rambling white Colonial home on a shaded street that smelled of blooming wildflowers, a woman called in a pleasant Southern accent

Jack Reacher and Michelle Chang spent three days in Milwaukee.

My last year of high school, when Kaycee Mitchell and her friends got sick, my father had a bunch of theories.

I don’t know where my dad is.

Last period Friday an acting inspector found a young teacher sobbing at her desk desk in the farthest demountable classroom of the lower secondaries of an outer suburban high school.