The blood of Adonis, thought Sarah, remembering the church that was built like a pagan temple. Coquelicot rouge - the symbol of a dying man whose blood stained the hillside in the spring.
Sarah Lane, abandoning her French lover for the brilliant Lebanese sunshine, believes that...Read more
Susan and Ed Middleton are perfectly content with their lives. Two kids, two cars, a solid brick bungalow in a respectable northern beaches suburb. They're good people, model citizens. There's barely a ripple in the surface of their happy existence. But when Susan's older sister, who...Read more
These are tales of fugitive lives: dazzling portraits of women and men on the run; from their present, their past, their future – from themselves…
Here, finally, is the complete collection of short fiction from award-winning author Wendy James. Holding a discerning mirror to...Read more
A world-famous and wealthy Australian film director, Roderick Lily, lingers on through the unfashionable off-season in beautiful Amalfi near Capri. He has become melancholic. He has left a disquieting mystery behind him in the Gold Coast Studios because he has left his greatest and his...Read more
A murder committed on paper, safely within the confines of a novel, is one thing. To see that same crime in the real world, is something else entirely...Frank Fons is a very successful crime writer. His novels, famed for their visceral descriptions of violent death, have made him a...Read more
Tim's stuff is disappearing and not just little stuff - things like his wardrobe and clothes. When he and his best mate set up a sting to catch the thieves, he is amazed to discover it's his parents!Read more
All Jimmy Diamond wants is a peaceful life with Carmel. Away from the city...Away from Crime... Away from his past. But the past just won't let him go. Someone's got a contract out on Jimmy. They think they've got him on the run. Only when it comes to vengence, no ones more lethal than...Read more
In a secret chamber uncovered by a fire that nearly destroys the nineteenth-century chapel at Archangels University, architect Harriet Darling finds a skull. The police have a body and murderer in mind, and on campus, rumours are rife. But Harriet wants to save the chapel from further harm...Read more
When a young American research assistant is killed by a man-eating lion, three people are devastated - Jed Banks, an American Special Forces soldier serving in Afghanistan; Professor Christine Wallis, a wildlife researcher in South Africa; and Hassan bin Zayid, a hotel magnate in Zambia....Read more
The third collection in the Crimes for a Summer Christmas series, featuring stories by 14 Australian writers, including Elizabeth Jolley, Marion Halligan, Peter Corris, Brian Castro, Marele Day and Jean Bedford.
After a week lost in the Australian outback, thirteen-year-old Tom Ferry makes his way back to Angel Rock. To the horror of everyone in the small town, he is alone. Exhausted and traumatized, he can't remember what happened to Flynn, his little brother. Shortly thereafter, another child of...Read more
In the heady days of the seventies, and at the tender age of nineteen, Decca Brand experimented with what was on offer - sex, drugs and intrigue. Far too much intrigue, it turns out, and of a sort that spells murder. Fast forward nearly thirty years and Decca is confronted by dangerous...Read more
This 90s thriller romance moves between the boardrooms of Sydney and the "Deliverance" country of the Tasmanian wilderness.
Heroine Brady Martin, twenty-eight and unemployed, ignites a rebellion among th Tasmanian farmers who are being forced off their land by the banks....Read more
They say I'm mad. I'm not. I'm just very, very smart.
Sarah and Ginny have been best friends since school. They both had their share of adolescent problems but now things are working out for Sarah.
She's met Tom. He's handsome, a journalist and totally devoted to...Read more
Claire is a Dunedin freelance writer who is hired by a dodgy lawyer to write a biography of a serial rapist at present in prison. She's wary, but she's a solo mother with a teenage daughter and desperately needs the money. The rapist's very name, Travis Crill, inspires revulsion from...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
Set in the current art scene in a fictitious Sydney Art Gallery where Tom is employed as a security guard a well publicised Rembrandt exhibition is under threat from a daring international art thief. One of Australia's foremost mystery-thriller writers, Tom Howard succeeds in foiling the...Read more
As a child, Ali Neuman narrowly escaped being murdered by Inkatha, a militant political party at war with Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. His father and brother were not so lucky. Only he and his mother survived the carnage of those years. But as with many survivors, the...Read more
When Louise Cantor finds her twenty-eight year old son dead in his apartment, everything indicates it was a suicide. Louise, however, refuses to accept this, and with nothing more than few suspicions and a mother's intuition, she and her ex-husband set out to find what happened. What they...Read more
Val McDermid, Reginald Hill, and Peter James are just some of the 24 top selling crime writers who have contributed stories to Criminal Tendencies, an exciting new crime short collection. Alongside the big names will be stories from first-time authors Chris Nickson and Caroline Shiach,...Read more
''For I prefer beauty always a little soured. When it comes to me as a spoonful of syrup, I spit it out.''
Gilbert Hand hasn't been the same since his wife died. He's moved to a dull but respectable hotel where silence seems to brood in the hall and stairway. In a secret drawer...Read more
'Weeks went by when Ismay never thought of it at all. Then something would bring it back or it would return in a dream. The dream began in the same way. She and her mother would be climbing the stairs, following Heather's lead through the bedroom to what was on the other side, not a...Read more
June 1945. The war is over. As dawn breaks across the hills of Provence, 15-year-old Pierrot stumbles across the body of Capitaine Patrocle, a local hero of the Resistance, who has been murdered. In his wallet, Pierrot finds a letter, which he conceals beneath his cap. It provides the key...Read more
Once a fortnight, Fred Crawford drives his battered truck on the toughest mail run in the world - across sand dunes, salt pans and the fearsome Stony Desert - along the loneliest road in the Australian Outback. For the men and women of the remote cattle stations on the way, Fred's visit is...Read more
When Cassandra gives Ryan a present for his 40th birthday, she prophesizes that by midnight, he will get his heart’s desire but before midnight Ryan is forced to walk out of his own party to investigate a murder.
Ryan’s investigations into the drowning of a butler reveal the...Read more
Gregoire Nakobomayo, a petty criminal, has decided to kill his girlfriend Germaine. He's planned the crime for some time, but still, the act of murder requires a bit of psychological and logistical preparation. Luckily, he has a mentor to call on, the far more accomplished serial killer...Read more
Fluke Kelso was once a scholar of promise, but like so many in the highly competitive world of academia, he's never delivered. But one night, at a symposium in Moscow concerning the release of secret Soviet archives, he is approached by Papu Rapava, a former Kremlin bodyguard with a story...Read more
Michael O'Shea is a member of Ireland's police force, known as the Guards. He's also a sociopath who walks a knife-edge between sanity and all-out mayhem. When an exchange program is initiated and twenty Guards come to America and twenty cops from the States go to Ireland, Shea, as he's...Read more
Hitchhiking along the Hume Highway, a woman searches for the man who killed her daughter. Her only clue - left in her daughter's final phone message - is that the man has a tattoo on his left arm saying "Die Mother"
With her daughter dead and with nothing to live for, the...Read more
