Crime Fiction

The richest wine merchant in Paris is found dead -- shot in front of an elegant house where discreet clients are in the habit of renting rooms for discreet purposes. Everything seems to point to a crime sparked by jealousy. But Maigret is surprised to find a curious absence of shock or...Read more

Maigret is a few years short of his retirement and has just refused promotion to the post of Head of the Police Judiciare, preferring the human contact he enjoys as Head of the Criminal Division. His wish is granted when Madam Nathalie Sabin-Levesque, an elegant but highly nervous lwoman,...Read more

Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley is drawn into an uncanny case involving murder and a bizarre, hypnotic young woman suspected of being a witchRead more

DEVIL’S PEAK begins with a prostitute telling her story to a clergyman. On her lap is a shoe box. What’s in the box?  

Inspector Benny Giessel has just been thrown out of the house by his wife. She has given him an ultimatum.  Choose either the booze or his family. He has six...Read more

Hardy has never been much of a family man, so when he meets his second cousin Patrick Malloy it's like being hit with a left hook to the solar plexus—Malloy is his double. Cliff and his cousin become friends and travel to attend a gathering of the Irish Travellers, the gypsy-like folk from...Read more

Charged with espionage—and bigamy to boot—John Ryder didn’t have a prayer of a defense. His trial was beginning the next morning in the Old Bailey when his desperate barrister turned to Antony Maitland. Ryder swore that he had never laid eyes on the defecting KGB agent who claimed Ryder...Read more

An outbreak of kleptomania at a student hostel was not normally the sort of crime that aroused Hercule Poirot’s interest. But when he saw the list of stolen and vandalized items – including a stethoscope, some old flannel trousers, a box of chocolates, a slashed rucksack and a diamond ring...Read more

On a signboard at Cobargo I read the magic word 'Bermagui'. "That's the place Zane Grey wrote about," remarked my son. "That's the place I'm looking for," I decided. And what a place! Oh, what a place. The air like wine and as cool as that in the green ferntree depths of the gully beside my...Read more

A selection of stories featuring Australia's favourite PI, plus unpublished writing by Peter Corris on crime.

For almost four decades Peter Corris was known as 'the godfather of Australian crime fiction', and Cliff Hardy has been Australia's favourite private investigator since...Read more

On holiday on the island of Rhodes, Poirot is concerned to observe an eternal triangle between Valentine, Tony and Douglas. His concern is justified when Valentine dies after drinking a poisoned cocktail!

Published in 1936 this story has a very similar plot to that of Evil Under...Read more

In the middle of an unusually hot Swedish summer, a young woman studying at the Vaxjo Police Academy is brutally murdered. Police Inspector Evert Bäckström is unwillingly drafted in from Stockholm to head up the investigation.

Egotistical, vain and utterly prejudiced against...Read more

It's August 2007, and Lars Martin Johansson, chief of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation in Sweden has opened the files on the unsolved murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme. With his retirement quickly closing in, Johansson forms a new group comprised of a few trustworthy...Read more

The leader of a religious cult in Guyana instigates a mass suicide. He succeeds in killing himself and his whole flock of worshippers, save one. In a wood outside Ystad, the police make an horrific a severed head, and hands locked together in an attitude of prayer. A Bible lies at the...Read more

Dirty dealings, corrupt cops, computer geeks and a final showdown at an exclusive Sydney beach - is this Cliff Hardy's last adventure?

Stripped of his investigator's licence and with his appeal denied, Cliff Hardy faces an uncertain future. Then something very personal happens...Read more