A literary detective story ingeniously told in ten cases. John Dorn is a classic gumshoe. His woman has left him, he lives in his office, and he drinks too much. His one friend, a lawyer named Demetri, hands Dorn an infinite supply of hopeless cases and lost causes, to which Dorn, ever the...Read more
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
Kate Shugak is a native Aleut working as a private investigator in Alaska. She's five foot, one inch tall, carries a scar that runs from ear to ear across her throat, and owns a half-wolf, half-husky dog named Mutt. Resourceful, strong-willed, defiant, Kate is tougher than your average...Read more
Jerusalem Lane is a little piece of Dickensian London untouched by development, its inhabitants mainly refugees from pre-war central Europe. But could elderly Meredith Winterbottom really have been killed for the politics of another age?
As DS Kolla and DCI Brock delve into the...Read more
The theft of a valuable diamond necklace, and the death by apparent suicide of a notorious film star, have nothing in common. Nothing except Detective Franz Heineken, aka Pufferfish, scourge of an island’s villains and a deadly match for it unpredictable, unsettling crimes.
At...Read more
How long should long service leave be?
Pufferfish, aka Detective Inspector Franz Heineken, scourge of Tasmania's villains, is back. And back with a seriously refreshed vengeance, Pufferfish, prickly, curmudgeonly and irony-charged as ever, is attracted to an unusual stench in his...Read more
In one of the finest and most pivotal books in this critically acclaimed series, never before published in the U.S., D.S. Kathy Kolla reports to New Scotland Yard and to D.C.I. David Brock's Serious Crime Division.
Just before Kolla is to start her new job, a young woman is...Read more
For DS Kathy Kolla the chance to investigate the unnatural death of a physio at the exclusive Stanhope House Clinic seems the ideal opportunity to leave behind more mundane police duties. Especially when what at first seemed suicide or accidental death is clearly more complicated. A cover-...Read more
When a woman is kidnapped and her husband refuses to pay the ransom, she plans her revenge with the help of her kidnappers. She frames her husband for her "murder" in this clever tale of redemption. A contemporary, fast-paced thriller, A Decent Ransom blends pathos with trickery and...Read more
Meet Cliff Hardy. Smoker, drinker, ex-boxer. And private investigator. The Dying Trade not only introduces a sleuth who has become an enduring Australian literary legend—the antihero of thirty-seven thrillers—but it is also a long love letter to the seamy side of Sydney itself.Read more
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
n Australia's 1930s, the Sinclair name is respectable and influential, yet the youngest son Rowland - an artist - has a talent for scandal. Even with the unemployed lining the streets, Rowland lives in a sheltered world... of wealth, culture & impeccable tailoring with the family fortune indulging his artistic passions & friends... a poet, a painter & a brazen sculptress.Read more
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
Emily Tempest, a feisty part-aboriginal woman, left home to get an education and has since traveled abroad. She returns to visit the Moonlight Downs “mob,” still uncertain if she belongs in the aboriginal world or that of the whitefellers. Within hours of her arrival, an old friend is...Read more
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
Do you believe in ghosts? Do we really live on in some conscious form after we die, and is that form capable of communicating with the world of the living?...Aye, right.
That was Jack Parlabane's stance on the matter, anyway. But this was before he found himself in the more...Read more
It's summertime in the Granite city: the sun is shining, the sky is blue, & people are dying. It starts with a prostitute, stripped naked & beaten to death down by the docks. Despite DS Logan MacRae's best efforts, it's not long before another body turns up on the slab.Read more
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
DS Logan McRae and the police in Aberdeen hunt a child killer who stalks the frozen streets. Winter in Aberdeen: murder, mayhem and terrible weather!
It's DS Logan McRae's first day back on the job after a year off on the sick, and it couldn't get much worse. Four-year-old David...Read more
It was a junket, a freebie. A 'team-building' weekend in the highlands for lawyers, advertising execs, businessmen, even the head of a charity. Oh, and a journalist, specially solicited for his renowned and voluble scepticism - Jack Parlabane. Amid the flying paintballs and flowing Shiraz...Read more