A Trio of Sophies

Secrets, lies and love.

Mystery and unsettling revelations keep up the suspense in this page-turning novel.

The last time I saw Sophie A, she was kissing James Bacon. She could have any guy she wanted, but she was kissing an English teacher who was eight years...Read more

Bush Sick Land

Bush Sick Land is a mystery.

The setting is a small New Zealand town at the tail end of the 1960s.

After the violent death of his best friend, Constable Colin Coates is drawn into a case involving an old flame and her missing teenage son, a taxidermist timber...Read more

Barrenjoey Road

A gripping expose of a notorious cold case 1978. An idyllic beachside community. A series of abductions and rapes. So what happened to Trudie Adams?

Back in the 1970s, Sydney's Northern Beaches felt like a slice of paradise to those lucky enough to live there....Read more

Sprigs

It is Saturday afternoon and two boys’ schools are locked in battle for college rugby supremacy. Priya – a fifteen year old who barely belongs – watches from the sidelines.

Then it is Saturday night and the team is partying, Priya's friends have evaporated and she isn't sure...Read more

Crimechurch

Life in the safe suburbs of Christchurch isn't dangerous enough for Marty. He needs excitement in punk, protest, politics and crackpipes. Marty soon finds Mona, a teenage runaway living in a flophouse of skinheads and goths. The two of them live for drugs and dodgy deals but they are...Read more

Dark Empire

Katherine Mansfield created some of literature’s most chilling characters, not least Harry Kember and his wife. They seemed out of place among the families enjoying summer holidays at Wellington’s Days Bay. Some of the women at the Bay thought that one day Harry would commit a murder....Read more

Dance Prone

1985. Neus Bauen, a post-hardcore band from Illinois, are touring America, on the brink of fame. When one member of the band is sexually assaulted and another is wounded by a gunshot, these two cataclysmic events alter the course of the band’s four members’ lives forever.

...Read more

Hidden Killer

As a final year Law student Gilbert Hastings and Lucille Dellow take a holiday job to renovate the Old Stone House in Arbor Valley. The owner of the Old Stone House, Elsie Leggat has moved into a rest home and has been persuaded to sell her house by a corrupt Nadine Norton. Nadine has a...Read more

The Stone Wētā

“We talk about the tyranny of distance a lot in this country.
That distance will not save us.”

With governments denying climate science, scientists from affected countries and organizations are forced to traffic data to ensure the...Read more

The Secrets of Strangers

A regular weekday morning veers drastically off-course for five strangers whose paths cross in a London café - their lives never to be the same again when an apparently crazed gunman holds them hostage. But there is more to the situation than first meets the eye and as the captives grapple...Read more

Missing on Lion Rock

Sandy Barrett's hiking escapades were usually uneventful and relaxing, until the day she risked her life saving a trapped seagull and tumbled down a 100 metre cliff. After tree branches miraculously broke her fall, her body lay battered on a rocky ledge. A greater horror lay await to...Read more

The Security

Secrets. Everyone has them. Nice ones that make your heart soar, little ones that make you blush, naughty ones that make you smile and dark ones you hope will remain hidden forever.

One thing’s for certain – everyone wants their secrets kept out of the public eye. Especially...Read more

Low Flying

Matt Bullock, an Auckland university student clashes with his flying instructor Jason Collins who tries to hit on Matt's racy girlfriend Fleur Lassiter, resulting in the two men brawling at their aeroclub.

Illegal immigrant Vladimir Zhukov, a ruthless Russian veteran of the...Read more

The Boys and Men of Auckland's Mickey Rooney Gang

In a working-class suburb of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1957, eight mildly rebellious schoolboys, inevitably obsessed with sex, were attracted to the arrogant and thoroughly delinquent little Mickey Rooney whose fantastic dreams of Hollywood fame were to be his downfall.

It wasn...Read more

The Killing Hour

'They come for me as I sleep. Their pale faces stare at me, their soft voices tell me to wake, to wake. They come to remind me of the night, to remind me of what I have done.'Read more

The Devils You Know

Vincent needs a change. He's spent the last fifteen years in covert operations for the US government, but after a botched and fatal mission, he decides he's done with pulling triggers.

He lucks into a dream job in Santa Barbara as head of security for supermarket mogul Eugene...Read more

Tin Man

This is almost a love story.

Ellis and Michael are twelve when they first become friends, and for a long time it is just the two of them, cycling the streets of Oxford, teaching themselves how to swim, discovering poetry, and dodging the fists of an overbearing father. And then...Read more

The Spiral

Erma Bridges' life is far from perfect, but entirely ordinary. So when she is shot twice in a targetted attack by a colleague, her quiet existence is shattered in an instant.

With her would-be murderer dead, no one can give Erma the answers she needs to move on from her trauma...Read more

The Schoolgirl Strangler

The shocking true story of a serial killer in 1930s Melbourne.

November, 1930. One sunny Saturday afternoon, 12-year-old Mena Griffiths was playing in the park when she was lured away by an unknown man. Hours later, her strangled body was found, mouth gagged and hands crossed...Read more

Welcome to Ord City

All refugees welcome in Australia!

In 2023, Australia reversed its closed border policy and said to the world: ‘Welcome! You are free to come to Australia, but you must spend the first seven years in the Temporary Citizenship Zone around the Ord River.’

Seven years...Read more

The Halifax Slasher

Carolyn Pickles retraces the true story of how 11 people came to be brutally cut with a deadly sharp implement, in a spate of attacks that left a town in a state of fear and police mystified about the identity of the attacker.

Halifax, West Yorkshire, 1938. The hunt is on for a...Read more

Over My Dead Body

Cryogenicist Dr Georgette Watson has mastered the art of bringing frozen hamsters back to life. Now what she really needs is a body to confirm her technique can save human lives.

Meanwhile, in New York City, winter is closing in and there’s a killer on the loose, slaying...Read more

Murder in the Midst

Eight different women. One thing in common: serious crime.

A cabinetmaker, private investigator, journalist, mystery lady, homemaker, police officer, true-crime writer and flavourist. Between them they witness, investigate, perpetrate and are victims of serious crime....Read more

Prior Violations

Mitch Walker's week starts strangely enough when, half drunk, he finds himself intervening in an armed robbery. The bizarre outcome of this encounter does nothing to prepare him for what lies ahead in the coming days. Heart breaking events lead him down a dangerous path into the ruthless LA...Read more

The Black Beacon Book of Mystery

The first Black Beacon Book of Mystery brings you original and reprinted tales from locked-room mysteries and armchair detective puzzles to noir adventures and police investigations. It includes a brilliant Sherlock Holmes pastiche and the second Oscar Tremont novella. This is the perfect...Read more

Angel of Death

The newspapers called her 'Australia's most beautiful bad woman' and she was deadly to know...

This is the story of 'Pretty' Dulcie Markham, a key figure of the underworld of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, who, according to one crime reporter, 'saw more violence and death than...Read more

How to Pronounce Knife

An ex-boxer turned nail salon worker falls for a pair of immaculate hands; a mother and daughter harvest earthworms in the middle of the night; a country music-obsessed housewife abandons her family for fantasy; and a young girl's love for her father transcends language.

In this...Read more

Black Souls

In the remote Aspromonte Mountains in southern Calabria, Italy, three best friends embark on a life of crime in order to raise themselves up out of the poverty of their childhoods and the suffering of their parents. Brainy Luciano, the behind-the-scenes schemer, was orphaned as a little boy...Read more

Agent Running in the Field

Nat, a 47-year-old veteran of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, believes his years as an agent runner are over. He is back in London with his wife, the long-suffering Prue. But with the growing threat from Moscow Centre, the office has one more job for him. Nat is to take over The...Read more

You Yet Shall Die

A novel about family secrets and discovery of a long-ago crime. Hilda is a reclusive single woman who lives on the North Kent marshes with her rescue cats. One day she has a visit from a young woman called Nicky, who claims to be her half-sister, the "love child" of Hilda's father who has...Read more

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