Crime Scenes Stories

Is there really such a thing as an innocent person?

Teachers, cops, mothers, wives, everyone has their breaking point; that moment where it could go either way. From the prostitute with no way out, to the bitter author, and a cop who just wants his leave, the characters in this...Read more

Troll

A gripping and explosive psychological thriller about a young woman who disappears in suspicious circumstances, having been hounded by a vicious online troll.

Years ago, Fortune gave up on his daughter, Sophie, after a troubled adolescence. Now she's gone missing, vanished...Read more

A Killer Harvest

Joshua is convinced there is a family curse. It's taken away his biological parents, robbed him of his eyesight, and is the reason his father Logan, the detective who raised him, is killed while investigating the homicide of a young woman. The suspect, Simon Bowers, is killed by Logan's...Read more

The Rip

A young woman living on the street has to keep her wits about her. Or her friends.... but when the drugs kick in that can be hard.

Anton has been looking out for her. She was safe with him. But then Steve came along.

He had something over Anton. Must have. But he had a...Read more

Blood River

Brisbane 1999. It's hot. Stormy. Dangerous. The waters of the Brisbane River are rising. The rains won't stop. People's nerves are on edge. And then...A body is found. And then another.And another.A string of seemingly ritualized but gruesome murders. All the victims are men. Affluent. Guys...Read more

Death Going Down

In the early hours of the morning, a woman is found in the elevator of a plush apartment block on Santa Fe Road, Buenos Aires. She's young, gorgeous—and dead.

It looks like suicide, and yet none of the building’s residents can be trusted; the man who discovered her is a...Read more

The Sawdust House

San Francisco, 1856. Irish-born James ‘Yankee’ Sullivan is being held in jail by the Committee of Vigilance, which aims to rout the Australian criminals from the town. As Sullivan’s mistress seeks his release and as his fellow prisoners are taken away to be hanged, the convict tells a story...Read more

El Dorado

There is a serial child killer stalking the streets of Melbourne.

The victims are killed gently, lovingly, a gold mark traced on their forehead.

This killer doesn't hate children.  This killer believes in childhood innocence at any cost.

Unflinching...Read more

No Less the Devil

'We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.'

It's been seventeen months since the Bloodsmith butchered his first victim and Operation Maypole is still no nearer to catching him. The media is whipping up a storm, the top brass are demanding results, but the...Read more

Fever City

The story kicks off in 1960 Los Angeles, with the daring kidnapping of the child of one of America's richest men. It then darts back and forth between a private detective's urgent search for the child, the saga of a notorious hit man in the days leading to JFK's assasination, and the modern...Read more

Death of a Typographer

Martin Kern has a special sensitivity to fonts, a skill that he uses to solve typographical crimes. When a local printer is found dead in his workshop, his body in the shape of an X, Martin and his co-investigator, journalist Lucy Tan, are drawn into a mystery that is stranger than anything...Read more

Devotion

Hanne Nussbaum is a child of nature - she would rather run wild in the forest than conform to the limitations of womanhood. In her village of Kay, Hanne is friendless and considered an oddity...until she meets Thea.

Ocean, 1838

The Nussbaums are Old Lutherans, bound by...Read more

Edenglassie

Two extraordinary Indigenous stories set five generations apart. When Mulanyin meets the beautiful Nita in Edenglassie, their saltwater people still outnumber the British. As colonial unrest peaks, Mulanyin dreams of taking his bride home to Yugambeh Country, but his plans for independence...Read more

Sleeper Agent

In the sleepy town of Gainesville, Cooper Fox is a beloved local figure with a mind clouded by amnesia from a devastating car accident. But a chance encounter with three menacing strangers shatters the image of Cooper as a gentle guy with a foggy past, leaving the town of Gainesville to...Read more

The Creeper

Victim ... or killer?

For the last decade, the small mountain town of Edenville in Victoria’s high country has been haunted by the horrific murders of five hikers up on Jagged Ridge.

Also found dead near the scene was Bill ‘Creeper’ Durant, a bushland...Read more

The Burning Stones

Saunas, love and a ladleful of murder...

A cold-blooded killer strikes at the hottest the head of a sauna-heater company is murdered ... in the sauna. Who has turned up the temperature and burned him to death?

The evidence points in the direction of...Read more

A Kind of Loving

All about love, lust, and loneliness, the book introduces Vic Brown, a young working-class Yorkshireman. Vic is attracted to the beautiful but demanding Ingrid, and as their relationship grows and changes, he comes to terms the hard way with adult life and what it really means to love. The...Read more

Absolute Friends

Today, Mundy is a down-at-the-heels tour guide in southern Germany, dodging creditors, supporting a new family, and keeping an eye out for trouble while in spare moments vigorously questioning the actions of the country he once bravely served. And trouble finds him, as it has before, in the...Read more

'Twixt Land and Sea

In this collection, first published in 1912, Conrad has brought vividly to life the world of the sea and its adventurers. 'The only bond,' he wrote 'between these three stories is, so to speak, geographical, for their scene, be it land, be it sea, is situated in the same region which may be...Read more

Blind Date

Elisabeth Kennedy is a complicated, prickly ex-police detective recovering from a brutal attack of deadly acid - and a woman who is determined to fight back. Unable to escape the memory of her sister's murder, Elisabeth flees the stiflingly safe confines of her mother's seaside home to...Read more

An Evil Hour

No one was more stunned than Annie Maddox when they found the body of Gerald Culver MP. Because Annie, the manager of the Wellington Hotel, Amblesea, was Culver’s mistress.

Enter Harry Lambert, ex-policeman-turned-reluctant-private-eye, who's hired by Culver's wife to find her...Read more

Bleak Water

Beyond the new city center developments, the old Sheffield canal is overgrown, run down, and deserted. Signs of regeneration creep along its towpaths, including a small innovative gallery housed in one of the warehouses. But between the renovations it’s a dark and lonely place—the perfect...Read more

A Kiss of Fire

Three friends witness a terrifying fire that kills a Japanese painter when they are very young, and after growing up with the memory, one of them could be responsible for a chain of deadly arsonsRead more

Dark Victory

They put lives at risk. They twisted the law. They drew the military into the heart of an election campaign. They muzzled the press. They misused intelligence services, defied the United Nations, antagonised Indonesia and bribed poverty stricken Pacific states. They closed Australia...Read more

A City Of Strangers

For years the infamous Phelans, known with equal horror to the Social Security office and the local school, have lived in slovenly squalor in their council house in the run-down Belfield Grove Estate in the northern English city of Sleate.

The Phelans' infamy has even...Read more

A Clear Case Of Suicide

Laurence Deegan, QC, had just won his latest case. At fifty, already a distinguished and famous barrister, he seemed set to become a judge at an early age. That same evening, his triumph still fresh, he ran his bath, got into it and slit the veins in both wrists. Why had he done it? His...Read more

The Burning

The flames consumed everything. They licked the weatherboard walls of Peter Halliday’s shed and nibbled at the timber lining boards stacked in the rafters. They blackened and eroded the kiln-dried hardwood studs that formed the skeleton of the walls. They lapped at the pools of oil on the...Read more

A Place of Execution

Winter 1963: two children have disappeared in Manchester; the murderous careers of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady have begun. On a freezing day in December, another child goes missing: 13-year-old Alison Carter vanishes from the isolated Derbyshire hamlet of Scardale. For the young George...Read more

Cop This!

In 1969 a home-made bomb explodes in the sleazy heart of Brisbane's Fortitude Valley, killing eleven people and igniting a controversy that could threaten the government itself. When small time criminal Johnny Arnold is charged, his fight for justice sets two men - father then son - on a...Read more

A Hank of Hair

''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

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