Schoolmaster Joe Askern has made a truce with life. His interests are simple and kept within safe bounds - until he meets Cess Carter, the friendly local criminal and father to one of Joe's more delinquent students, and he finds that he has risked everything that matters to him.Read more
'I was born in 1939. The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War, but for the moment, that did not affect me.' In the first instalment of Clive James's memoirs, we meet the young Clive, dressed in short trousers, and wrestling with the demands of school,...Read more
‘Cynthia can understand how Anahera feels just by looking at her body.’
Cynthia is twenty-one, bored and desperately waiting for something big to happen. Her striking fitness instructor, Anahera, is ready to throw in the towel on her job and marriage. With stolen money and a...Read more
The phone call ended seven years of exile, but was a catalyst for murder . . .
When Dr Caitlin Summerfield took the message, her satisfying life included a rich, sexy boyfriend, an exciting career and, best of all, she was free of the emotional maelstrom that characterised her...Read more
Peter is a planning officer at Nottingham City Council. Every day, as he boards the bus for work, he notices a girl who gets on at the same stop and spends the journey scribbling furiously in a battered notebook. One day she doesn't get off at her usual stop, but dashes off to the railway...Read more
Here are stories from Australia's Dark Heart: of catastrophe and misfortune, intrigue and passion, betrayal and tragedy. Some you may think you know - others, you have never heard of - but all will capture your imagination.Read more
"But down these mean streets must go a man who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished or afraid." When Raymond Chandler wrote these words in his classic The Simple Art of Murder, he drew a blueprint for the male private eyes who descend from Philip Marlowe to populate the world of...Read more
Just as he strikes it rich with his pseudonymous romance novels, poet and professor of literature Arnold Simon finds his double life falling apart, with his agent vanished, a fellow author murdered, and the model hired to pose as the author missing.Read more
Ordinary people plunge into insurmountable personal debt and fall prey to dangerous webs of underground creditors-so dangerous, in fact, that murder may be the only way out. A beautiful young woman vanishes, and the detective quickly finds she was not whom she had claimed to be. Is she a...Read more
Bent law officers exist in every era, sabotaging the work of their colleagues and putting the community at risk.
James Morton and Susanna Lobez have illustrated, in several Gangland books, that Australia almost certainly has out-ganged other countries. Now their...Read more
Dark Emu puts forward an argument for a reconsideration of the hunter-gatherer tag for precolonial Aboriginal Australians. The evidence insists that Aboriginal people right across the continent were using domesticated plants, sowing, harvesting, irrigating and storing – behaviours...Read more
In the beginning, there was nothing but endless flatness. Then came the Carpet...
That's the old story everyone knows and loves (even if they don't really believe it). But now the Carpet is home to many different tribes and peoples, and there's a new story in the making. The...Read more
Andy Walker, son, lover and an ex-soldier, knows tragedy is only ever a heartbeat away.
When an inmate escapes from the prison farm upriver and abducts Nathan, a child Andy has vowed to protect after losing his own son years before, Andy Walker discovers that the escapee is a...Read more
Journalist Harry Fizglen is sceptical when his editor asks him to investigate the background of Simone Anderson, a new Bloomsbury artist. But once he's met the enigmatic Simone, Harry is intrigued.
Just what did happen to Simone's twin sister who disappeared without trace several...Read more
Jock Lewis was supposed to have died in that terrible train crash at Paddington. Minty, his girlfriend, received a letter from Great Western telling her so. But, curiously, the police haven't been in touch. And Jock has borrowed all her savings . . .
Zillah also got a letter from...Read more
Story of Raymond Edmunds, a convicted rapist and double murderer who was active in Victoria, Australia from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. Edmunds was dubbed "Mr Stinky" by a newspaper editor due to his offensive body odour which was believed to have been caused by a mixture of milk, manure...Read more
Ruined City: When Henry Warren, director of an English bank, lands by chance in a hospital in a bleak Northern town that has been ruined by the closure of its shipyard, he discovers nothing less than a new purpose for his life. Moved by the fate of the town's inhabitants, Warren risks his...Read more
Daniel Armstrong, a world-famous TV naturalist, and anthropologist Kelly Kinnear forge a passionate alliance, and begin the fight against the forces of greed, evil, and corruption that are attacking a land they would both give their lives to save. Combining breathtaking realism and...Read more
In this tale of mystery and suspense, a stranger enters the inner sanctum of the Ashby family posing as Patrick Ashby, the heir to the family's sizable fortune. The stranger, Brat Farrar, has been carefully coached on Patrick's mannerism's, appearance, and every significant detail of...Read more
Stepan Povin, the KGB’s chief of foreign intelligence, is the West’s most prized intelligence agent. For years he has been passing secrets from the heart of the KGB. Now he wants out, and is seeking asylum in the West.
In exchange he has a stunning piece of information to offer:...Read more
Close-Up Leon's partner died in his bath, and although the police report said she took her own life... she didn't. When he meets Margot, overweight, lacking in confidence and recently separated, he sees an opportunity...Read more
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
The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted...Read more
Was Mrs. Sibley, the fat, elderly lady found dead tangled up with a broomstick on the East Anglian marshes, really a witch? The small Norfolk town was agog with the mystery, but Inspector Lovick was not convinced that witch-like flying had caused her death. There was a bruise on her head...Read more
The fact that the term ‘school shooting’ is even part of our modern vernacular is tragic enough. This seems to cover anything from the mass murder of children and staff at primary schools to that of adult students and staff at universities. It is a dissection of the aftermath of a single...Read more
"Trust her; couldn't snag a decent man in a year of bars and clubs, but she could find a handsome weirdo at the drop of a phone call."
The Darkness Within is a supernatural thriller in which Emily Winters must protect her family from a predatory coven of magicians. It...Read more
Just out of the big house, Rick is a good natured ex-crim with a plan to franchise a chain of cafes based on a prison theme. To finance his dream, he borrows from a low-life drug dealer and full-time paranoid, Guthrie. But moments before he is due to pay off his debt to Guthrie, his...Read more
John Silvester has been reporting on crime from the cop stations, courthouses, back alleys and gangster mansions of Melbourne for forty years. His contact book is a who's who of both sides of criminal justice, and the shadowy worlds between. He is the trusted confidante of cops, criminals,...Read more
Ruth-Ann Baker is a college dropout, a bartender—and an amateur detective who just can’t stay away from true crime. Nineteen years ago, her childhood friend was murdered by suspected serial killer Ethan Oswald. Still tormented by the case, Ruth can’t help but think of the long-dead Oswald...Read more
From the disappearance of the Beaumont children to the abduction of William Tyrrell to the double murder of Karlie Pearce-Stevenson and her daughter Khandalyce, Xanthé is determined to expose the truth to maximise dignity for both deceased victims and those left behind.
Xanthé...Read more