Deborah Sheldon | Severed Press

Nightmare Reef: A Deep Sea Thriller

severed_press_ — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 05:31:02 +0000

The ocean is vast. The danger is ancient. And nowhere is safe.

For the Wagner family, sailing across the Pacific was meant to be the adventure of a lifetime. But beneath their ageing yacht, Nauti Buoy, something stirs—something thought extinct for millions of years.
Then the nightmare begins. Hunted by plesiosaurs—ferocious predators from a forgotten age—the Wagners are thrust into a relentless fight for survival.

From award-winning author Deborah Sheldon, Nightmare Reef is a harrowing tale of one family’s battle to the death against nature’s brutality.

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CRETACEOUS CANYON

severed_press_ — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 12:06:24 +0000

Australia’s outback hides a mysterious canyon. Hidden deep within is a forest of pine tree that dates from the Cretaceous Period. A megacorporation sends in a team of experts to research this canyon for botanical riches. The expedition enters a no-man’s land formed 100 million years ago when Australia was still attached to Antarctica, and dinosaurs ruled the super-continent. But the canyon has more prehistoric and dangerous species than anyone could have possibly imagined. Trapped and terrified, unarmed and unable to communicate topside, the team’s extraction deadline is six long hours away. The frantic race for survival is on.

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MAN-BEAST

severed_press_ — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 16:17:52 +0000

Taylor’s Travelling Troupe of boxers has set up its tent at an isolated sheep station: bored farmers always bet to excess. Headlining the bare-knuckle fighters is Bluey, marketed as ‘The Man-Beast’, a Sasquatch-like monster, chained and kept drunk enough to fight punters without killing them. But the troupe has returned to where Bluey was first captured. Recognising the mountains, he calls again and again. And when his call is answered, all hell breaks loose.

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Body Farm Z

severed_press_ — Sun, 26 Apr 2020 21:13:36 +0000

To solve murders, you must understand the process of decomposition. Australia’s newest body farm, the Victorian Taphonomic Experimental Research Institute, is hidden in bushland some four hours’ drive from Melbourne. Scattered across its 150 acres are human donor cadavers and pig carcasses arranged to mimic some of the ways in which police might find murder victims: exposed to the elements, buried in a shallow grave, wrapped in tarpaulin. Forensic scientists and graduate students meticulously track each stage of putrefaction. Today, Detective Rick Evans of the Homicide Squad is at VITERI for the re-creation of one of his cold cases. A human donor will be locked inside a car. But the donor has other ideas… So begins a facility-wide outbreak of the reanimated dead

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THYLACINES

severed_press_ — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 11:29:15 +0000

The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, was hunted to extinction some eighty years ago. Now, Professor Rosie Giuliani and her staff at The Resurrection Lab have done the impossible: created a living, breathing litter from a preserved specimen. Yet Rosie can’t share this scientific breakthrough with the world. The cloned animals are more like monsters than thylacines. By chance, a small band of activists hears about the caged litter, and their decision to free the tigers will unleash a deadly havoc upon the campus of Fraser University.

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DEVIL DRAGON

severed_press_ — Tue, 22 Nov 2016 19:53:49 +0000

Dr. Erin Harris may be a scientist, but she has an unscientific obsession: to find a living Varanus priscus. Cryptozoologists call it the Devil dragon. This giant Australian reptile went extinct some 12,000 years ago but like Bigfoot or Nessie, there are occasional sightings. Spurred by a credible witness, Erin cobbles together an expedition party consisting of herself, the witness, and his deer-hunting neighbours. They travel into the unexplored heart of a remote national park. Erin, believing the Devil dragon to be a larger version of the Komodo, is confident she can outwit a specimen. However, the terrifying monster that lumbers out of the bush is a savage and unpredictable predator the size of a campervan. To escape, Erin must transform herself from genteel university lecturer to hard-core survivalist.

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