Danger Awards Shortlist Announced by the The Bad Sydney Crime Writers Festival
2025 SHORTLIST FOR THE DANGER AWARDS REVEALED
MEDIA RELEASE
This listing shows posts that went onto AustCrimeFiction.org in the last 14 days. Sorted into post type groups - Blogs (Updates), Books, Reviews.
Project Status Report: 30th July 2025
Seventh Status Report on the Project 'KEEP THE READING QUEUE UNDER CONTROL', with this month the subtitle of A Month in Which Some Things Went to Plan.
As always - the last fortnight entries and The Next Up Reading List in full.
An open road. A dead cop. A killer in the hills …
I flicked on the torch, swept the surrounds. Nothing. Then I directed the beam into the trees on the other side of the road.
Up on a high, jutting branch, something moved. It may have been a white face, a pale body, a curved leg. Or it may have been none of those things. Was it human? Too quick for me to tell. A ripple, a blink and it was gone. But it seemed to leave an afterglow, an impression upon the fabric of the night.
A tragic accident in paradise … or a calculated crime?
After her parents’ death in a car crash two years ago, Eve is back in the tumbledown family house on Magnetic Island, surrounded by nosy neighbours, an over-friendly possum and a cast of eccentric locals.
Em has lived a quiet life with her complicated mother and is now looking for love and a potential escape from her small hometown. When a masked man kidnaps her in the dark of night, though, she is drawn into a terrifying world.
Jodie has been trying to forget a troubling time in her life, pouring her trauma into her work and out of her mind. Until one night her daughter is kidnapped and Jodie is dragged back into the violence.
A mother vanishes. A daughter searches—down a dark and twisted trail in a bestselling edge-of-the-seat thriller about secrets, lies, and a family destroyed in one terrifying instant.
Seventeen-year-old Lies wakes up to find that her mother’s bed hasn’t been slept in. Her car is parked outside. And her purse and cell phone are still by the front door. After twenty-four hours, when every possible explanation is exhausted, the reality is all too frightening for Lies. Her mother is missing.
No.1 international bestselling author Tara Moss returns with an immersive post-war mystery as glamorous investigator Billie Walker follows a trail of secrets to Italy's sun-drenched Neapolitan coast.
Naples, 1943. Deep within a secret network of underground tunnels, a woman takes shelter from a wartime air raid and prays her husband will return safely.
Pacific Ocean, 1907. A young woman embarks on a lonely journey to begin a new life far from home.
When former high-powered lawyer turned PI Selma Falck is shot and her oldest friend, a junior MP, is killed in a sniper attack, everyone - including the police - assume that Selma was the prime target.
But when two other people with connections to the MP are also found murdered, it becomes clear that there is a wider conspiracy at play.
As Selma sets out to avenge her friend's death, and discover the truth behind the conspiracy, her own life is threatened once again. Only this time, the danger may be closer to home than she could possibly have realised...
The snow is falling
Selma Falck is living a nightmare. Trapped in a burning cabin on a freezing snow-covered mountain, she has no idea where she is or how she got there. Bruised, bleeding and naked, she barely makes it out in time as the flames engulf the cabin. With no signs of human habitation nearby, the temperature rapidly dropping, and a blizzard approaching, how will she survive?
Selma Falck's personal life and career as a lawyer have hit rock bottom. That is until Hege Chin Morell - Norway's best female skier - approaches her desperate to overturn a doping charge. With two months to the Winter Olympics, Selma faces the seemingly almost impossible task of clearing Morell's name.
Chilling, disturbing, and terrifyingly believable, an extraordinary thriller by one of the most exciting new voices in crime fiction
Heavy rain causes a landslide and a whole heap of trouble for Detective William Wisting – but when a body is found in the rubble the real mystery begins ...
Following weeks of heavy rain, the earth comes crumbling down on one of Larvik’s residential areas, burying a handful of houses.
Detective William Wisting is quick to join the rescue operation. Luckily, by sunrise the next day, it becomes clear that the landslide has claimed no victims.
The indefatigable Miss Phryne Fisher returns to solve what may be her most puzzling murder.
When Phryne Fisher is invited to Bendigo to witness the investiture of her old friend Lionel, who is being made a Bishop, her expectations of the solemn and dignified ceremony do not include a murder.
From NZ cop-turned-novelist Chris Blake comes a dark, gripping, intricate crime thriller set on the South Island's wild and remote west coast.
What does it mean to be a victim?
Without any warning, Justin Kowalski drives his vehicle across a line of traffic and through the front wall of Cafe 64, killing himself and three other people - and taking the reasons for this shocking act to the grave. Unable to locate any evidence of criminal behaviour or mental illness in Justin's past, and with no one left to prosecute, the police have no choice but to label it 'an isolated incident'.
You’re almost certain your daughter didn’t kill the neighbour. But what if she did?
Richard Wellington is one of the country’s most recognised doctors. A morning TV regular, surgeon to the elite, and scandal-proof despite a malpractice case that should have ruined him.
But when his body is found sprawled in a harbourside park on a sweltering Sydney morning, the facade shatters. His murder dominates the headlines, and the normally quiet cul-de-sac he called home becomes a media circus, seething with speculation and unease.
Located off the coast of South Australia, Kangaroo Island lies surrounded by violent seas harbouring deadly great white sharks and forgotten shipwrecks.
Over the centuries the Islanders have cultivated a sense of self-sufficiency, independence and resilience. But times are multimillionaires from the mainlaind are building immense clifftop mansions and filling the skies with private planes and helicopters. A quiet paradise is being transformed into a bolthole for the rich and privileged. And the locals aren't happy.
How do the living come back to life?
Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy.
Japan, 1869. A time of reform and rebellion.
Detectives Kazuki and Kawaji are assigned to investigate a series of seemingly impossible murders. Together with the help of a mysterious shrine maiden, can they solve each gruesome death and piece together the dark connection between them?
Taking us deep into the heart of 19th century Tokyo, The Meiji Guillotine Murders is a fiendish murder mystery from one of Japan's greatest crime writers.
The moment Raymond Electromatic set eyes on her, he knew she was the dame marked in his optics, the woman that his boss had warned him about.
Honey.
As the band shook the hair out of their British faces, stomping and strumming, the go-go dancer’s cage swung, and the events of that otherwise average night were set in motion. A shot, under the cover of darkness, a body bleeding out in a corner, and most of Los Angeles’ population of hired guns hulking, sour-faced over un-drunk whiskey sours at the bar.
Raymond Chandler famously hated science fiction, saying "They pay brisk money for this crap?" However, it has recently come to light that Chandler secretly wrote a series of stories and novels starring a robot detective. He then burnt all the manuscripts and went on writing his noir masterpieces. Unknown to Chandler, his housekeeper had managed to save some of these discarded manuscripts from the grate in his study, preserving the tales for future generations.
The indomitable Miss Cocks and Ethel Bromley return for Book Two in the bestselling and charmingly cosy Petticoat Police Mystery Series, inspired by one of Australia's first policewomen.
Danish journalist Heloise Kaldan is in the middle of a nightmare. One of her sources has been caught lying, and she could lose her job over it. And then she receives the first in a series of cryptic letters from an alleged killer.
Anna Kiel is wanted for murder but hasn't been seen by anyone in three years. When the reporter who first wrote about the case is found murdered in his apartment, detective Erik Schafer comes up with the first lead. Has Anna Kiel struck again? If so, why does every clue point directly to Heloise Kaldan?
The past is calling him home ... As a prospective barrister, Zaid Saban is on the cusp of achieving everything he has dreamed of. His social and professional world is far removed from his schoolyard days in the suburbs of western Sydney, even more far removed from the traumatic events of his final year of school in which best friend, Hass, was arrested for murder.
A missing girl, a hidden body, a decades-long cover-up, and old sins cast in new light: the classic procedural meets Scandinavian atmosphere in this rich, character-driven mystery, awarded Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year, that heralds the American debut of a supremely skilled international writer.
He was locked inside an abandoned house. But he's not the only one . . .
When a dead man is found locked in the basement of an abandoned house, deep in the woods, there is no evidence of what happened beyond his name - scratched into the wall before he died. The regional police can't find anyone who knew him.
The blood-stained murder and the poison pen
The Secret of the Angel Who Died at Midnight, Rosy Fenwicke
The first in a new series from NZ author Rosy Fenwicke, THE SECRET OF THE ANGEL WHO DIED AT MIDNIGHT is a police procedural novel introducing DSS Kate Sutton.
Dark Sky, Marie Connolly
When the Director of the Mt John Observatory Professor Evelyn Major is murdered, just as an international conference is kicking off at the observatory overlooking Lake Tekapo, there are a lot of academics in the vicinity, with a lot of secrets, making the pool of potential suspects surprisingly wide. Enter Criminal Psychologist Nellie Prayle who loves solving complicated murders, and finds plenty to be going on with in this web of rivalry, infidelity and emotional turmoil. One thing is for sure, this investigation does not lack for motives, nor does it lack intrigue.
Glass Barbie, Michael Botur
If you're looking for something that's wild, ranty, full to brim with nobody (including the good, bad, and slightly deluded) winning at anything, then GLASS BARBIE could be just the ticket.
Stillwater, Tanya Scott
It seems, to this reader at least, that there are a couple of main "types" of crime fiction these days. The new, unusual, clever idea stuff that breaks new ground and the tried and tested world of old ground. The problem with the old ground version is that it's sometimes very easy to sound like same old same old. Which adage most definitely does not apply to STILLWATER.
Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud, Lee Murray
Wellington, 1923, and a sixty-year-old woman hangs herself in a scullery; ten years later another woman ‘falls’ from the second floor of a Taranaki tobacconist; soon afterwards a young mother in Taumarunui slices the throat of her newborn with a cleaver.
Liar's Game, Jack Beaumont
The third in The Frenchman series, written by a pseudonymous author with real life experience in French Intelligence this is a modern day espionage series, with all the tradecraft and real-life emotional ups and downs you'd ever want to read about, informed by some frighteningly current threats and plotlines.
For anyone new to this series, there's a quote towards the end that pretty well sums it all up:
Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times.
AustCrime Update July / early August 2025
This newsletter starts out with a list of upcoming releases that have wandered past - some out now / some upcoming:
RELEASE DATE: 19/6/2025 I've added this one to this update because, to my chagrin, I missed it completely at the time it was released.
