Cutters End

A scintillating crime thriller, set in the South Australian outback town of Cutters End. A mysterious death on New Year’s Eve 1989 leads to a shocking murder investigation 32 years later...

A desert highway. A remote town. A murder that won’t stay hidden....Read more

Wipptee

A feisty cozy mystery with an enemies to lovers rural romance on the side. A young woman wants a quiet life in a small country town, but her past crimes as an animal rights activist return to haunt her.

Maddison Debranz returns to Australia after five years away, desperate for a...Read more

Death at the Belvedere

It’s a mostly normal Friday evening in the Rusty Bore Takeaway. Cass Tuplin’s cleaning down the grill when her glamorous sister Helen walks in, all bones in an Italian-weave suit and the kind of state that calls for the full comfort: double bacon cheeseburger with extra chips.

It...Read more

Wild Place

In the summer of 1989, a local teen goes missing from the idyllic suburb of Camp Hill in Australia. As rumours of Satanic rituals swirl, schoolteacher Tom Witter becomes convinced he holds the key to the disappearance. When the police won't listen, he takes matters into his own hands with...Read more

Wintersmith

At nine, Tiffany Aching defeated the cruel Queen of Fairyland. At 11, she banished an ancient body-stealing evil. At 13, Tiffany faces a new challenge: a boy. And boys can be a bit of a problem when you're 13.

But the Wintersmith isn't exactly a boy. He is winter itself: snow,...Read more

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Charity Ends at Home

“I am in great danger … I know that murder is going to be the reward for my uncomplaining loyalty.”

This letter containing heartfelt and urgent pleas for help is received by three very eminent citizens of Flaxborough, including the Chief Constable...Read more

Lonelyheart 4122

Whatever can have happened to Lil?

Flaxborough butcher Arthur Spain is worried that his sister-in-law hasn’t been in touch lately, so he pays her a visit. But Lil’s not at home, and by her porch door are a dozen bottles of curdling milk… Alarmed, he calls in...Read more

Hopjoy Was Here

The gripping sight of four burly policeman manhandling a bath down the front path of a respectable villa isn’t one the residents of Flaxborough see every day.

Net curtains twitch furiously, and neighbours have observations to make to Chief Inspector Purbright ...Read more

Bump In the Night

Tuesday nights have suddenly turned quite ridiculously noisy in the country town of Chalmsbury, where the good folk are outraged at having their rest disturbed.

It begins with a drinking fountain being blown to smithereens – next the statue of a local worthy loses his head, and...Read more

Coffin, Scarcely Used

In the respectable seaside town of Flaxborough, the equally respectable councillor Harold Carobleat is laid to rest. Cause of death: pneumonia.

But he is scarcely cold in his coffin before Detective Inspector Purbright, affable and annoyingly...Read more

Birthdays For the Dead

Detective Constable Ash Henderson has a dark secret…

Five years ago his daughter, Rebecca, went missing on the eve of her thirteenth birthday. A year later the first card arrived: homemade, with a Polaroid picture stuck to the front – Rebecca, strapped to a chair, gagged and...Read more

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55

There were 54 victims before this. Who is number 55?

Wilbrook in Western Australia is a sleepy, remote town that sits on the edge of miles and miles of unexplored wilderness. It is home to Police Sergeant Chandler Jenkins, who is proud to run the town's small...Read more

Greenlight

Eliza Dacey was murdered in cold blood.

Four years later, the world watched it unfold again on screen.

Producer Jack Quick knows how to frame a story. So says Curtis Wade, the subject of Jack’s new true crime docuseries, convicted of a young woman’s murder four years...Read more

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The Dark Lake

The lead homicide investigator in a rural town, Detective Sergeant Gemma Woodstock is deeply unnerved when a high school classmate is found strangled, her body floating in a lake. And not just any classmate, but Rosalind Ryan, whose beauty and inscrutability exerted a magnetic pull on...Read more

Live and Let Fry

For Cass Tuplin, proprietor of the Rusty Bore Takeaway (and definitely not an unlicensed private investigator), it’s weird enough that her neighbour Vern has somehow acquired a lady friend. But then he asks Cass to look into the case of the dead rats someone’s dumped on Joanne’s doorstep....Read more

Signal Loss

A small bushfire, but nasty enough for ice cooks to abandon their lab. Fatal, too. But when the bodies in the burnt-out Mercedes prove to be a pair of Sydney hitmen, Inspector Hal Challis’s inquiries into a local ice epidemic take a darker turn. Meanwhile, Ellen Destry, head of the new sex...Read more

Dead Men Don't Order Flake

On the night Leo Stone returns—notionally from the dead, in reality from the Democratic Republic of the Congo—Cass Tuplin gets a call from Gary Kellett. A call about an actual dead person: Gary’s daughter, killed in a car crash. Gary’s adamant it wasn’t an accident.

Cass agrees...Read more

Kittyhawk Down

"A missing two-year-old girl, and the body of an unidentified drowning victim have brought Homicide Squad Inspector Hal Challis, of the Peninsula Police Force, to Bushrangers Bay at the Australian seaside not far from Melbourne. All is not idyllic in this resort community; far from it. Cars...Read more

Murder with the Lot

A smart, sassy self-appointed private investigator, Cass Tuplin is unforgettable and the town of Rusty Bore will never be the same...

Cass Tuplin's takeaway isn't the last shop left in Rusty Bore. There's also Vern's General Store. But it's true the town's not exactly overflowing...Read more

Whispering Death

Hal Challis is in trouble at home and dressed down by the boss for speaking out about police budget cuts; missing his lover, Ellen Destry, who is overseas on a study tour. But there's plenty to keep his mind off his problems. A rapist in a police uniform stalks Challis's Peninsula beat,...Read more

Chain of Evidence

Twice now he’d watched her take this detour after school, down to the waterfront reserve, to the magic of the Waterloo Show. Dodgem cars, Ferris wheel, fairy floss on a stick. The Show was a magnet to all kinds of kids, but he had chosen only one.

Ten-year-old Katie Blasko is...Read more

Blood Moon

My name is Dirk Roe and for your information my brother was almost beaten to death last night.’

Challis glanced at Roe’s they were well kept and unmarked. He shifted his gaze to the man’s face, which wore the sour look of someone who’d once been admired and was waiting for it to...Read more

The Dragon Man

The first Challis & Destry Novel. The heat's ramping up, the usual holiday madness building. D.I. Hal Challis is already recycling his shower water and dreading Christmas. But this year there's something more. Women abducted and murdered on the Old Highway, a pall of fear over the...Read more

Snapshot

On Saturday evening she’d watched Robert have sex with five women. She’d had sex with two men. And now it was Tuesday morning and she was driving along the highway with her seven-year-old daughter.

Sex with strangers on a Saturday, family outings in the station wagon on Tuesday...Read more

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