This listing shows posts that went onto AustCrimeFiction.org in the last 14 days. Sorted into post type groups - Blogs (Updates), Books, Reviews.
Corinne Gray’s life is falling apart. When homicide detective Kyle Nazarian unexpectedly knocks on her door on a rainy morning, she knows why. He wants to talk about her son, Ben.
An average teen in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, Ben is dating his first girlfriend and trying to find an after-school job. But as his luck sours, he’s increasingly drawn into shadowy corners of the internet.
England, 1905. Rebecca Victoria Davies-Australian, bastard, and unrepentant murderess-has spent three decades delivering justice where the law refuses to tread. Now embedded in the Metropolitan Police's covert Special Branch, she is charged with hunting the men abducting and murdering young aristocrats. But Rebecca has her own reasons for pursuing predators, and none of them are written in any statute book.
Dunblane 1996. Columbine 1999. Utøya 2011. Christchurch 2019. Lewiston 2023.
What drives someone to commit the unthinkable? In Running Amok, forensic psychiatrist Paul E. Mullen burrows into the minds of lone wolf mass murderers, exposing the troubling patterns underlying their actions.
The year is 2082. Climate collapse, famine and war have left the world in ruins. In the shadow of the Alpha-Omega regime – descendants of the super-rich architects of disaster – sixteen-year-old Boo Ashworth and her uncle risk everything to save what's left of human knowledge, hiding the last surviving books in a secret library beneath the streets of Hobart.
Tess enters the prestigious and exclusive Ravensthorpe Writing College with dreams of literary greatness, but soon discovers that ambition comes at a cost.
Drawn into a tight-knit group with fellow writers Ethan, Theo, and Jaz, Tess’s world is upended when their charismatic tutor is found dead. Believing someone in their circle is responsible, Tess flees the elite literary world and abandons the future she once craved.
When a Hollywood star is killed live on stage, the entire cast falls under suspicion … Can a disgraced journalist and a rule-bending detective with a PhD in AI crack the case?
A Sydney Opera House production of The Rocky Horror Show ends in tragedy when a stage prop kills Hollywood star Dane Cooder in a spectacularly gruesome fashion. The whole theatre, including his wife and co-star Angelique Swan, watch in horror.
Simon Noone is a serial killer…but he doesn’t know it. Pulled from a river in Guatemala in 1982 with nothing—not even his memories—he returns to America five years later, looking for answers. He finds work at an NYC meatpacking plant and meets rebel ex-cop turned private investigator Nomi Pace. But she has problems all her own.
What would you do if someone you knew came back from the dead?
Gin is an architect on the brink. LIT, the Auckland-based practice she shares with her girlfriend, Clary, has been precarious since their third partner – Clary’s ex, Billy – disappeared, presumed dead.
Sydney, 1980 Belle Fitzgerald, young, rich and spirited, lives in Kings Cross, the city's bohemian heart. When she learns of plans to demolish her street and evict its residents, she commits to fighting the development, even though this brings her up against the Cross's crime lords and their servants, the notoriously corrupt local cops. Recklessly, dangerously, against her better judgment, she embarks on a passionate affair with one of those cops, Sergeant Stanton Rose.
Bruce College, a private school in a leafy Melbourne suburb, is a place for winners. Affectionately known as Bruisers, its boys' football program has a reputation for pumping out superstars. But when its girls' team pushes for glory, sixteen-year-old Grace Dooley is left with a catastrophic brain injury, and her parents want someone held accountable. The school points the finger at the coach, Brick Hannaford, a former professional player who is struggling with the legacy of his lauded, 300-game career. Brick says he was coaching the kids exactly as the parents and school hard.
At age twenty-eight, Romola Cross is already jaded by her work as a criminal defence lawyer in Sydney. In the aftermath of her father's death, she decides to reinvent herself, and blindly accepts a position at prestigious Melbourne law firm Bassett Brown. She soon finds herself in a place where the clients are household names, and the stakes are higher than she could have possibly imagined.
Alexis Turner walks into the police station to report an assault. By the end of the day, she is nowhere to be found.
Soon after she disappears, three identical packages arrive at three very different a respected psychologist's home, a socialite's mansion, and a struggling single father's run-down apartment. Inside, each gift is perfectly tailored to its recipient - and each will tear apart the life of its intended victim.
When Elspeth returns from New York to her hometown of Geelong, it's not for a holiday - it's because her mother, Simone, has vanished without a trace.
Elspeth moves in with her sister, Aoife, and old wounds reopen as they circle around their father's death years earlier. But Elspeth's own behaviour soon unsettles those around her. She's jittery, secretive - and the police begin to wonder if she's hiding something more than grief.
A glamorous historical mystery of murder, fashion, food, secrets, and danger in 1930s Paris.
The inimitable Charlotte 'Charlie' James returns in her second exciting mystery.
At a glitzy gala in the ballroom of the Hotel Ritz, young American tourist Maisy Bell meets an intriguing man and accepts his charming offer to take her on a day trip.
A mother's worst fear, a killer on the loose, a darkness visible... A gripping page-turner for readers of Candice Fox and Karin Slaughter from an award-winning author.
Sergeant 'Hex' Rexford is the detective who caught the infamous serial killer Dr. Witcherton. Now, with a series of gruesome murders unfolding inside Coast Sanctuary - a hospital for the criminally insane - Witcherton claims to know who's behind them. Hex takes the case, determined to uncover the truth, even as his own body is failing him.
At the age of five, Molly Walker was placed in protective custody after witnessing the murder of her mother, Constable Sammi Walker. Twenty years later, everyone assumes the threat has passed.
Then Molly's adoptive parents are killed in a car accident, just after asking about reopening the investigation into Sammi's death. Coincidence or something more sinister?
Melbourne is gripped by fear after a backpacker's body is found with a cryptic note, and two more women vanish without trace. When photographs begin to arrive in the inboxes of the media and police, it's clear the killer isn't hiding - they are performing.
Perth, 1981.
Brothel madam Destiny Purcell controlled half the city's vice trade—until someone executed her on a golf course in the rain.
The police blame a junkie. Case closed.
For fans of Snowtown, James Ellroy, and Underbelly, BANG! delivers brutal Australian noir where corrupt cops, motorcycle clubs, and a desperate young killer collide in 1980s Perth—Australia's most isolated city, with its own rules and its own justice.
A blizzard is approaching Siglufjörður, and that can only mean one thing…
When the body of a nineteen-year-old girl is found on the main street of Siglufjörður, Police Inspector Ari Thór battles a violent Icelandic storm in an increasingly dangerous hunt for her killer … The chilling, claustrophobic finale to the international bestselling Dark Iceland series.
Easter weekend is approaching, and snow is gently falling in Siglufjörður, the northernmost town in Iceland, as crowds of tourists arrive to visit the majestic ski slopes.
Two days before Christmas, a young woman is found dead beneath the cliffs of the deserted village of Kálfshamarvík.
Did she jump, or did something more sinister take place beneath the lighthouse and the abandoned old house on the remote rocky outcrop?
With winter closing in and the snow falling relentlessly, Ari Thór Arason discovers that the victim's mother and young sister also lost their lives in this same spot, twenty-five years earlier.
**1955.**Two young couples move to the uninhabited, isolated fjord of Hedinsfjörður. Their stay ends abruptly when one of the women meets her death in mysterious circumstances. The case is never solved. Fifty years later an old photograph comes to light, and it becomes clear that the couples may not have been alone on the fjord after all…
Belfast, 1980, is the apocalypse. Bombings, riots, army on the streets, low flying helicopters, and ever-present rain. The grinding Northern Irish civil war between Protestants and Catholics has been going for a decade now. Hated by both sides are the police.
Sean Duffy Year 1 takes us into that world. Newly promoted Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy is given his first command at Carrickfergus CID.
When Varg Veum reads the newspaper headline 'YOUNG MAN MISSING', he realises he's seen the youth just a few days earlier – at a crossroads in the countryside, with his two friends. It turns out that the three were on their way to a demonstration against a commercial fish-farming facility in the tiny village of Solvik, north of Bergen.
Varg heads to Solvik, initially out of curiosity, but when he chances upon a dead body in the sea, he's pulled into a dark and complex web of secrets, feuds and jealousies.
From Danish crime master Michael Katz Krefeld comes a gripping Nordic noir.
In the eye of the storm, truth is her only anchor...
Dr Maja Holm seeks solace in a desolate Norwegian coastal town, fleeing a turbulent past. But as her gruelling work hours and self-medication take their toll, she teeters on the edge.
When a patient's mysterious death raises suspicions, Maja's intuition sparks a daring alliance with local TV journalist Stig Norland. Together, they plunge into the town's secrets, racing against the impending polar storm.
Copenhagen author Hannah is the darling of the literary community and her novels have achieved massive critical acclaim. But nobody actually reads them, and frustrated by writer's block, Hannah has the feeling that she's doing something wrong.
When she expresses her contempt for genre fiction, Hanna is publicly challenged to write a crime novel in thirty days. Scared that she will lose face, she accepts, and her editor sends her to Húsafjöður – a quiet, tight-knit village in Iceland, filled with colourful local characters – for inspiration.
Icelandic sisters Áróra and Ísafold live in different countries and aren't on speaking terms, but when their mother loses contact with Ísafold, Áróra reluctantly returns to Iceland to find her sister. But she soon realises that her sister isn't avoiding her … she has disappeared, without trace.
As she confronts Ísafold's abusive, drug-dealing boyfriend Björn, and begins to probe her sister's reclusive neighbours – who have their own reasons for staying out of sight – Áróra is led into an ever-darker web of intrigue and manipulation.
A final reckoning…
With the fate of her missing sister, Ísafold, finally uncovered, Áróra feels a fragile relief as the search that consumed her life draws to a close. But when Ísafold's boyfriend – the prime suspect in her disappearance – is found dead at the same site where Ísafold's body was discovered, Áróra's grip on reality starts to unravel … and the mystery remains far from solved.
When Áróra receives a call telling her that a child she's never met is claiming to be her missing sister reincarnated, she is devastated … as ridiculous as the allegations might seem. For three years she has been searching for her sister without finding a single clue, and now this strange child seems to have new information.
When the clerk arrived to unlock the bookstore on Via Corridoni, the last thing he expected to find inside was a dead Senator. . .
Now Inspector De Vincenzi has been assigned the case and the only clue is a missing copy of a rare book, La Zaffetta, taken from the room where the Senator lies dead. As the bodies begin to pile up, supernatural forces seem to be at work. But it was no spirit that put a lead slug in the back of Senator Magni’s head.
All Olivia wanted was one last miserable Christmas with her husband’s awful family before moving to Australia. She didn’t expect a murder.
Now the snow has cut them off and she’s stuck in a stately country house, with her increasingly deranged relatives and the rising suspicion that someone is picking them off one by one.
As the bodies pile up and the festive façade starts to crack, Olivia must survive the season, or, at the very least, get through lunch without anyone else choking on a sprout.
Devon, 1929. Members of the Pedhurst and de Reve families gather to hear unpopular matriarch Julia Pedhurst (née de Reve) read from her late husband’s will. One of the houseguests is fighter pilot Fred Willets, now an inspector in the Kalgoorlie Gold Squad, who has come to the UK as a beneficiary of the will. When Aunt Julia dies before the reading, and another death follows soon after, everybody in the manor house is a possible suspect. It is up to Willets, assisted by the bright young pharmacist Prudence Meadows, to crack this whodunnit.
Poet Omar Sakr's debut novel is a fierce and fantastic force that illuminates the bonds that bind families together as well as what can break them.
WHEN THE DEEP DARK BUSH SWALLOWS YOU WHOLE is the first in the Ryan Bradley series (the second - THE FIRST LAW OF THE BUSH was released on 6/1/2026 prompting me to extract the digit and read this!), set in New Zealand's rugged and remote King Country, around the small town of Nashville. A community made up of people who have been there for generations, relying mostly on agriculture as the main economic driver, it's a quiet place, with the spectre of a series of disappearances of women hanging over it.
I cannot explain it either. One look at the blurb of this and you'd think I'd be backing away at the fastest possible rate. A couple of chapters in and I was wondering what on earth I thought I was reading.
An historical mystery set in 1943 New Zealand, featuring soon to be retired DI John MacBride, WRONGDOINGS is a book that's centred, unsurprisingly given the timeframe, around the fallout from war.
The 4th book in the Bizarre House Murders (sometimes known as The House Murders) series by Japanese author Yukito Ayatsuji. A well known writer of Japanese detective and mystery fiction, he's an adherent to the classic rules of the genre, always incorporates reflective and poignant elements, and in this series has constructed a series of elaborate locked room settings (see below).
A DEADLY INHERITANCE is the third book in the Caius Beauchamp series. The first two (THE OTHER HALF and THE IN CROWD) were most definitely crime fiction with a hefty side serving of "having a go at the uppercrust" and hugely enjoyably.
From the blurb:
1943 – Bletchley Park, England
Whoever said "write what you know" to Michael Armstrong got their message through loud and clear. THE MALL is set in the world of high finance commercial real estate, and features the wheeling, dealing, and dodging goings on of that, as well as the life and times of an ambitious young Curtis Ryan.
The blurb is worth reading on this one, with the final paragraph worth using as the kicking off point for this review:
Second part of this newsletter - other regions recent arrivals / upcoming releases only. If the first part didn't arrive you can read it online here.
You may notice a preoccupation with places of Ice and Cold. It happens around here in Summer.
First newsletter for 2026. As anticipated January was a nightmare of fire weather, stinking heat, dust storms, kilometres walked checking on everyone and everything, no rain and did I mention heat.... Amazed we got anything done really other than slogging it out trying to keep the burnable trash in the house yards to a minimum and animals and birds alive. But here we are. Sort of upright.
I'm sending this out in two parts as I suspect it's a bit too long for the newsletter delivery system so other regions additions to follow in the next instalment.