The Canvas Killings
![[node:field_alt_text]](https://austcrimefiction.org/files/styles/medium/public/book-covers/canvas-killings.jpg)
30 years ago …
Renowned artist, James Montague Ballantyne, is convicted of murdering eight people and using their remains in his infamous paintings.
Now …
A face is recognised. Three lives collide. Old wounds reopen...Read more
Sorted on book title (not in series order)
![[node:field_alt_text]](https://austcrimefiction.org/files/styles/medium/public/book-covers/canvas-killings.jpg)
30 years ago …
Renowned artist, James Montague Ballantyne, is convicted of murdering eight people and using their remains in his infamous paintings.
Now …
A face is recognised. Three lives collide. Old wounds reopen...Read more

Where is the mail order bride?
Summer 2019 in New Zealand. On the last day of a backpacking holiday, Kate loses her bag on a vineyard tour and misses her flight home to England. An eccentric elderly man comes to her rescue and invites her to stay on as his paid...Read more

George Pell is the most recognisable face of the Australian Catholic Church. He was the Ballarat boy with the film-star looks who studied at Oxford and rose through the ranks to become the Vatican's indispensable 'Treasurer'. As an outspoken defender of church orthodoxy, 'Big George's'...Read more

An isolated, empty ski resort in the off-season. A woman who doesn't want to be found. A man who may not be who he appears to be. A game of cat and mouse - with deadly consequences.Read more

Theft. Murder. Love Tested.
A priceless Shakespearean First Folio is stolen from an English manor house.
A man is dead.
Oxford student Stephanie Cooper is drawn into the dangerous criminal world of art theft when she meets attractive young detective...Read more

Ancient archaeology.
Ruthless antiquities traffickers.
When recently recovered Syrian antiquities are stolen in the Greek Islands, Stephanie Cooper and boyfriend James Knox find their vacation interrupted as they help archaeologist friends Kerry and Nico try to...Read more

Bad things happen. Everybody dies. But the girl in the red dress kicks against the pricks. Four merciless and compelling stories by emerging writers from Canada, the UK, and USA.
From behind the wheel of her father's lovingly restored Barracuda, a waitress will protect her baby...Read more

Melbourne, 1959. An 11-year-old boy witnesses a murder as he spies through the window of a strange house. God, whom he no longer counts as a friend, obviously has a pretty screwed-up sense of humour: just one year before, the boy had looked on helplessly as his twin brother, Tom, suffered a...Read more

When Detective Inspector Jaye Hamilton stops at an Auckland liquor store for a bottle of champagne, it is supposed to be his daughter Addison has just gotten engaged. Instead, he is suddenly gunned down at the register by a balaclava-clad assailant in what appears at first to be a random...Read more

A classic collection of mysteries from the Golden Age of British crime writing, by the author of The Scarlet Pimpernel.
Mysteries! There is no such thing as a mystery in connection with any crime, provided...Read more

In snow smothered Warsaw, Luke Case, a boozy English hack with a dark secret, starts a dangerous affair with a gangster’s wife. Case escapes to the sweltering Spanish heat where he meets a colourful cast of characters, including a mysterious torch singer and a former East End villain with a...Read more

A trip to Paris in the company of a beautiful dame would be many men’s idea of heaven. But a flight to France with the gorgeous Helen Damnation rapidly spirals into a journey to hell.
Rainbow’s daughter is missing and he doesn’t know who’s taken her – or why. Nor does he know...Read more

Rainbow's got the blues. His girlfriend's dumped him; his assassin mate Rory's found God; his Aunt Rube's as sick as a bad joke; and his ex-wife's thrown up a barricade - all right, a cordon bleu - around his daughter Imogene.
So when a snake's let loose in a laboratory, his...Read more

When Mister Rainbow finds a headless honcho in a King’s Cross alleyway, the tattoo around the corpse’s neck leaves little doubt as to its identity. Thomas L. Tycho was everybody’s enemy – a trickster, a dirty dealer, and a wide boy who made the mistake of wide boys the world over – not...Read more

She's a surgeon, she's beautiful and she desperately wants Mister Rainbow to shed some light on her husband's past. But when he does, she wishes he hadn't. Because what Rainbow discovers is a handless hood - and a whole lot of murders. Rainbow's a retro private eye who keeps himself to...Read more

When a few too many dead bodies turn up on Sydney’s mean streets, Mister Rainbow’s too busy to investigate – until an old flame goes up in smoke.
Then it’s no holds barred as the famous PI with the dancing feet finds himself pitted against the city’s crooked gamblers – and the...Read more

The first in a detective series that “immediately joins the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency as representing the best in international cozies” ( Booklist , starred review).Meet Vish Puri, India’s most private investigator. Portly, persistent, and unmistakably Punjabi, he cuts a determined...Read more

The kids in a state - and if he doesn't play his cards right that could read Islamic state. Terrorists want to recruit him but he's too terrified to oblige. Instead he calls in Rainbow who finds himself in the thick of an affair that threatens to end in a bloodbath.
Can Rainbow...Read more

You think your phones are bugged and people are out to get you. Everyone’s a suspect and violence is the answer to everything. Put bluntly, you’re a psychopath who might one day kill a loved one in mistake for the Devil. You describe your nemesis as ‘horribly scarred’ one minute and ‘...Read more

Cliff Hardy is flattered to be offered the job as head of security at the new Sydney casion. But the thought of office hours and wearing a suit put him off and her refuses in facour of his friend, Scot Galvani.
When Galvani is murdered and the police are indifferent and the widow...Read more

This place is paradise. A gleaming, golden paradise, and mark my words, we intend to keep it that way, by any means possible. You can bet on it.
Detective Lana Cohen thought she had found a slice of peace on the sun-drenched Gold Coast, but her respite is shattered...Read more

Cassie has survived a hit and run but now she hears her father has disappeared - supposedly run off with a news reporter. As a senior congressman and Speaker of the House, her father is an important player in the tense world of American politics. Cassie knows he would not walk away from his...Read more

West of France, 1989.
A weeping killer deposits the unconscious body of nineteen year old Lucie Martin, her head wrapped in a blue plastic bag, into the water of a picturesque lake.
Lot-et-Garonne, 2003.
Fourteen years later a summer heatwave parches the...Read more

He is not what he seems . . .
Ed is delighted to meet his twenty-three year old daughter's fiancé for the first time. Abbey is head-over-heels in love with her new man. Smart, successful and handsome, Ryan appears to be the perfect future son-in-law....Read more

A loveless marriage becomes a tangle of hatred … but who is pulling the strings?
Sydney, 1972
When Jane Fenton returns from Australia to her childhood home in England, free from the shadow of her overbearing...Read more

Boy, girl, artist, advocate. Courtney is more than the sum of her parts.
Meet Shane Jenek. Raised in the suburbs of Brisbane, Australia, by loving parents, Shane realises from a young age that he’s not like all the other boys. At a performing arts agency he...Read more

University professor Alex Wearing has been murdered in his study, and the weapon is a valuable museum artefact. His brother, James, is the key suspect in Inspector Fitzjohn's investigations. In this gripping tale of intrigue, James and Fitzjohn follow different paths in their own search...Read more


You can run from anything... but your fears.
When Sergeant Cam Fraser thinks the gang who murdered his wife and son are targeting his daughter, he relocates to the other side of Australia, not expecting trouble in the small country town where he was raised. But a violent,...Read more

Fast-paced Australian political fiction, Challenge unfolds over three days in an atmosphere of treachery and deceit, amid a looming federal leadership challenge.
Opposition leader Daniel Slattery is a former sporting hero from the wrong side of the tracks, politically...Read more

“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