Venice, 1762. As Carnevale bursts across the city revellers take to the streets in masks and lavish costumes to lose themselves in pleasure. Yet while Venetians celebrate, a nightmare is about to unfold . . .
Laudomia Codussi, a beautiful young woman tormented by terrifying...Read more
Lydia and Elisa, twin sisters, identical in appearance, different in every other way.
Lydia has her life in order and opinions on everything, from her husband's business to her sister's friends, to her fellow teachers. If only those around her could live up to her high...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
It had been a normal day at work. Monika was locking up, ready to head home, when the man arrived. She didn't even see his fist until it was far too late...
Bundled into a car, tied up and taken in darkness to an old mill in the thick of a forest, she has been flung into a...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
These are the true and uncensored accounts of Australia’s hardest inmates.
Martin Bryant – who killed 35 people and injured another 23 at Port Arthur in 1996 – is a 160kg slob who trades sex for chocolate in Risdon Prison. Twenty years after Australia’s worst massacre, his...Read more
Certain Admissions is Australian true crime at its best, and stranger than any crime fiction. It is real-life police procedural, courtroom drama, family saga, investigative journalism, social history, archival treasure hunt - a meditation, too, on how the past shapes the present,...Read more
Rachel McManus has just started at the New Zealand Alarm and Response Ministry. One of the few females working there, she is forced to traverse the peculiarities of Wellington bureaucracy, lascivious colleagues, and decades of sedimented hierarchy. She has the chance to prove herself by...Read more
To her clients and colleagues, Iris is a therapist in a city psychology practice. But to the police and fire services, she is the Fire Lady – a profiler of arsonists.
After a troubled young man burns down her office, Iris just wants a quiet life. But her peace is shattered when...Read more
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
An unsolved murder takes one of Australia’s foremost writers of non-fiction into the 1930s Bohemian demi-monde, exploring the fate of a talented young woman trying to make her way in that artistic, sexualised, ‘liberated’ world.
As enigmatic in life as in death, Mollie Dean was...Read more
Cassie has survived a hit and run but now she hears her father has disappeared - supposedly run off with a news reporter. As a senior congressman and Speaker of the House, her father is an important player in the tense world of American politics. Cassie knows he would not walk away from his...Read more
How far would your government go?
A right-wing US president has withdrawn America from the Middle East and the UN. Daesh has a thoroughfare to the sea and China is Australia's newest ally. When a bomb goes off in remote Tasmania, Astrid Coleman agrees to return home to help...Read more
In a city of elusive agendas, it's hard to find the truth. It's even harder to find what's right. A bootlegger's dream is rocked by an attempt to destroy his lucrative business. What begins as a curious evening snowballs into a night-time odyssey as Fontana searches for answers he never...Read more
When seven-year-old Alyssa is kidnapped, Deputy Noah Harper decides he will do what it takes to find her – but that means crossing lines he can never come back from. Finding the girl safe, isn’t enough to stop Noah from losing his job, his wife, and from being kicked out of Acacia Pines. He...Read more
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
Tara Costigan was the woman next door. A hard worker. Quick to laugh and easy to like. She was happy, confident, strong. A woman who always looked after herself and her kids. Close with her family and her friends, she was much loved. Then, in 2013, she met Marcus Rappel. A local tradie, he...Read more
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
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
Acclaimed explorer Rob Nash has lost his way. Grieving the loss of his wife, and blaming himself for her death, he sees no reason to carry on. But when his 'Uncle' Frank Douglas offers him the chance to lead a cave diving expedition in the jungles of Papua, Nash can see some light at the...Read more
Nat lives a picture-perfect life, but it wasn’t always this way. A victim of horrific bullying when she was a teenager, Nat will do anything to keep distance between the girl she was before and the woman she is now.
But when her best friend is murdered and people begin to point...Read more
The Widow of Walcha is a shocking true story about death, love and lies in the small NSW town of Walcha.
All farmer Mathew Dunbar ever wanted was to find love and have a family of his own. That’s why, just months after meeting Natasha Darcy, the much-loved grazier didn’t hesitate...Read more
'Theo. Come to Oliver's winery. Search for Four Dogs Missing. You'll find me there. We need to talk.'
While estranged twins Oliver and Theo Wingfield are identical in appearance, they couldn't be more different. Theo, an extrovert verging on arrogant, was always a drifter, a...Read more
Problem Solved is a true crime memoir following the life of Andrew Chambers, who at the end of his career was known as ''the blind private eye'. The book is based on true stories that reveal the clandestine, funny, and often confronting world of private investigations.Read more
If, like Kane, you're a Denied Access Area spy for the CIA, then boundaries have no meaning. Your function is to go in, do whatever is required, and get out again - by whatever means necessary. You know when to run, when to hide - and when to shoot.
But some places don't play...Read more
Demon Copperhead is set in the mountains of southern Appalachia. It's the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot...Read more
Where does the adventure end . . .
and the nightmare begin?
Frank owns a service station on a little-used highway. His granddaughter, Allie, is sent to stay with him for the summer, but they don't talk a lot.
Simon is a...Read more
Journalist and podcaster Andrew Rule brings us eighteen Australian crime stories that have fuelled fears, fired outrage and broken hearts and dreams. Among them are events so infamous that a word or phrase propels us back to a time and place. The disappearance of the Beaumont children from...Read more
The Driver:
Ahead he could see only the stretch of unending road, on either side brown-scorched plains of dirt and scrub, above it all a soaring blue sky and blinding sun. Desolation that looked, to him, a hell of a lot like freedom. He wasn’t playing by anyone’s rules anymore....Read more
With the fate of Australia at stake, the two great Allied generals of the Pacific War face off against the Imperial Japanese Army - and each other.
12 March 1942: The Japanese have swarmed the Philippines, forcing US general Douglas MacArthur to flee with his...Read more