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Kaikoura Rendezvous.
Two Melbourne television colleagues are on a well-earned holiday, travelling New Zealand in a motorhome.
Will they survive a monster storm and a shootout?
Kim Prescott survived a killer’s bullet in Melbourne but can’t shake the PTSD. For Jo Trescowthick, the trip is a chance to confront family demons.
The third book in the Melbourne Spotlight series finds Kim and Jo on a road trip from Auckland in the North Island to the tourist mecca of Queenstown in the deep south: Rotorua mud pools, Kaikōura whale watching, the stunning Marlborough Sounds.
They won’t make it.
Debt-ridden South Island fisherman and ex-con Gordie Tulloch is offered the deal of a lifetime. Is it legal? He doesn’t care. All he has to do is survive the storm approaching the Shaky Isles. But Gordie’s every move is under scrutiny by a man whose own secrets are about to spill into public view.
And then of course Mother Nature has her own agenda. Cyclone Gita is on a serpentine path of destruction through the tropics that will see her smash into New Zealand.
The cyclone, the motorhome, the fisherman and the watcher all face an unexpected rendezvous in Kaikōura.
Peace Stick.
What can you do when the Cold War goes from a simmer to boiling?
In East Germany, the kinder create a symbol of hope to halt the nuclear missiles.
Erfurt, October 1962. Teenager Ingrid Richter's life involves adventures with the Pioneers, walks in the Steigerwald, the Martini festival in the medieval Altstadt. In a few weeks, she will be gliding across the skating rink with dreams of representing East Germany at the Olympics.
Ingrid’s schoolteacher shatters that peaceful existence.
“We are on the brink of World War III.”
The Soviet Union is secretly building missile sites in Cuba – minutes from the United States. Who will launch the first nuclear missile – Nikita Khrushchev or John Kennedy?
The political folly of angry men threatens Ingrid’s existence. Didn’t they learn any lessons from two world wars and the first atomic bomb? She understands there are no winners in a thermonuclear war.
Emotions sway from despair to hopes of survival. Ingrid wants a future: a career, her own family, a long life.
She enlists the help of her friend, Sylvie Witzenhause. They seek a lucky charm to protect themselves and the world – a peace stick.
Peace Stick was inspired by a real person dealing with a nuclear crisis that resonates to the present day.
Tugga’s Mob.
What happens on tour stays on tour was the mantra for southern hemisphere backpackers who swarmed Europe in the 1980s. Foreign countries had to be explored and devoured in every way possible.
Waikato-born Judy Williams worked hard for her big OE: London, Paris, Rome, Gallipoli; and the adventures were dutifully recorded in her diary.
A diary that also recorded how the obsessive Tugga Tancred and his Kiwi mates turned Judy’s trip of a lifetime into a nightmare of sly sexual harassment. Their bad behaviour went unnoticed, or was ignored by fellow passengers like Australian Andrew Hackett who chose to party hard with Tugga’s Mob. After all, they were in Europe for a good time, not a long time.
And what a time it was, until Tugga’s fixation ultimately led to murder; a crime that went unpunished for 30 years.
But few things remain hidden forever.
The rediscovery of Judy’s hand-written diary sparks a trail of revenge that the original perpetrators never see coming.
Boxed.
Three desperate women, their fates unwittingly aligned by a killer obsessed with retribution.
One is entwined by a selfish lover.
Her colleague charges into trouble to end animal cruelty.
The third scratches a record of captivity into a cellar wall.
Liberty is at stake for two, a bullet awaits the third.
Melbourne Spotlight journalist Kim Prescott is promoted to the TV reporting staff after the program’s exposé of the Tugga’s Mob murders. It was a ratings bonanza; the producers are overwhelmed with story ideas.
A tip-off suggests live-baiting in greyhound racing still flourishes, despite a national scandal which almost closed the industry. Images of possums and rabbits torn apart by frenzied dogs, all in the pursuit of money, are still fresh in the national psyche.
The trail leads Kim and her camera crew to the gold-mining ghost town of Steiglitz. They find horrific scenes at a trainer’s starting boxes – but not what they expect.
Production assistant Jo Trescowthick is the pawn of an activist with a vendetta. Where does her loyalty lie – the current affairs team or the lover?
The captive plots an escape as the media sleuths close in on the killer.
Who ends up in the sights of the 9mm pistol?
Boxed
Click play to view and listen to a passage from Stephen Johnson’s newest novel, ‘Boxed’.