Melbourne, 1868. When dazzling theatre star Marie St Denis dies in the arms of her best friend, fellow actress Lola Sanchez, everyone believes it was suicide by laudanum overdose. Everyone except Lola. On the brink of stardom herself, she risks everything by embarking on a...Read more
'One rainy Friday evening in the winter of 1993, a taxi swept through the streets of East Melbourne, on its way from the city to Richmond. That year was one of the few remaining when a great deal was known of the world, but not yet so much that the world had become over-known. Small gaps...Read more
It is May 1957. In London eight friends gather for a party. They are all displaced persons who have survived the worst World War II could throw at them. This gathering will be a time to share the fragile joy of liberty. But before the night is out, one of them will be dead. Who would commit...Read more
Singapore, 1939
A young Japanese woman is found dead on the dockside, her throat slashed
Inspector Maximo Betancourt is working a new beat, one he didn’t ask for. Following the disappearance of his wife, his life and career have fallen...Read more
Florence. Summer, 1538.
A night patrol finds a rich merchant hanged and set ablaze in the city’s main piazza. More than mere murder, this killing is intended to put the fear of God into Florence. Forty years earlier on this date, puritanical monk Girolamo...Read more
Lies + Deception = Murder
Melbourne 1925. Jasper Fitzalan Howard is found stabbed to death in his room at The Hotel Windsor. In a bizarre twist, he is clutching a tarot card, the Ten of Swords, in his right hand. Initially, the police identify him as a...Read more
A nameless friar turns up at Halfwell Station at the same time that Ana, the adopted daughter of the station owners, discovers a body in the desert during her midnight walk. But when Ana returns to look for it, the body is gone.
Death Leaves the Station brings the cosy...Read more
When loathed landholder Fred O' Donnell is found dead in a locked room with a bullet in his chest, rookie Detective Hartley must seek help from a mysterious wanderer to solve the case. And it' s one where everyone, including his family, has a motive and a secret to keep.Featuring the...Read more
'Isn't it your job to stop people being murdered?'
1911, on a winter's night in arid New South Wales wool country, mounted trooper Augustus Hawkins discovers the bodies of three young people. They are scions of the richest family in the district, savagely murdered on a...Read more
Detective Inspector Betancourt of the Singapore Marine Police is first on the scene. Something doesn't quite add up. He finds out that the archaeologist, Richard Fulbright, was close to deciphering the previously-untranslatable script on a pre-colonial relic known as the Singapore Stone....Read more
A seasoned police detective and a dog with a nose for crime. One dead body. Twelve suspects.
Sydney, Australia, 1933 : Wealthy impresario and amateur Egyptologist Roland Cuthbert Barry is murdered on his 60th birthday, and everyone attending the evening’s celebrations is a...Read more
July, 1945. The war in Europe is finally over. But Auguste Duchene, who survived occupied Paris at great personal cost, cannot escape his past. He finds himself helping the Allies to pursue a Gestapo war criminal through the ravaged and dangerous streets of Berlin. Duchene soon learns,...Read more
In late summer of 1879, an unexpected, early morning door knock alters Leonard Hardy’s life when a neighbour discovers an unidentified body outside his home. Naturally curious, he sets out to learn the identity of the dead man, but a series of peculiar events and the unexpected appearance...Read more
A secret life exposed
Melbourne, 1925. Reggie da Costa, The Argus ’s celebrated crime reporter, takes a break from investigating gangland crime to assist Ruby Rhodes, whose identical twin sister has died in mysterious circumstances. Together, they investigate how Katherine...Read more
Florence. Spring, 1537.
When Cesare Aldo investigates a report of intruders at a convent in the Renaissance city’s northern quarter, he enters a community divided by bitter rivalries and harbouring dark secrets.
His case becomes far more complicated when a naked man’s...Read more
He’ll do anything to save her … even work for the enemy.
August, 1944. In German-occupied Paris, former schoolteacher Auguste Duchene has stumbled upon an unusual way to survive: he finds missing people. When he’s approached by the French Resistance to locate a missing priest...Read more
John Lacey's lust for power and gold brings him riches and influence beyond his wildest dreams. Only he knows the terrible crime he committed to attain that wealth. Years later, as Lacey ruthlessly presides over the town he has built and named after himself, no one has the courage to...Read more
Florence. Winter, 1536. A prominent Jewish moneylender is murdered in his home, a death with wide implications in a city powered by immense wealth.
Cesare Aldo, a former soldier and now an officer of the Renaissance city’s most feared criminal court, is given four days to solve...Read more
It is October 1923. What looks like a routine report, on the heavy rains battering Melbourne, becomes another case of murder for The Argus’s celebrated crime reporter, Reggie da Costa, devotee of fashionable suits and flamboyant automobiles. A flooded basement hides a ghastly secret: the...Read more
Death is just a close shave away.
It is February 1918. Somewhere in the bayside suburbs of Melbourne, the Death Mask Murderer is lurking, engaged in a ritualistic killing spree: shaving the heads of young women, strangling them and creating a gruesome...Read more
In 1944, in the outer-Melbourne suburb of Nunawading, a brutal triple murder heralds the return of a long-forgotten cult. A man named Anthony Prescott has declared himself the Messiah and has promised his followers immortality. There are those who believe him and who are ready to kill in...Read more
In 1932, the R.M.S. Aquitania embodies all that is gracious and refined, in a world gripped by crisis and doubt.
Returning home on the luxury liner after months abroad, Rowland Sinclair and his companions dine with a suffragette, a Bishop and a retired World Prophet. The Church...Read more
In the autumn of 1944, George Starling prepares to exact revenge on the person he hates most in the world (and Starling has a long list of people he hates), Detective Joe Sable of the Melbourne Homicide division. Driven by his dark passion for Nazism, Starling is going to make sure that...Read more
The Port Fairy Murders is the sequel to The Holiday Murders, an historical crime novel set in 1943 in the newly formed Homicide department of Victoria Police. The Holiday Murders explored the little-known fascist groups that festered in Australia both before and during the war, particularly...Read more
If only the killings had stopped at two. The police are desperate to come to grips with an extraordinary and disquieting upsurge of violence. For Constable Helen Lord, it is an opportunity to make her mark in a male-dominated world where she is patronised as a novelty. For Detective Joe...Read more
'It was suffocatingly hot, and the audience of howling children was viciously indifferent to the violence being done to my integrity as an artist by every ghastly syllable I was obliged to utter and by every mincing step I was obliged to take. As the foul smell of the ancient wig I was...Read more
In early 1933, Rowland Sinclair and his companions are ensconced in the superlative luxury of The Hydro Majestic - Medlow Bath, where trouble seems distant indeed.
And then Harry Simpson vanishes.
Croquet and pre-dinner cocktails are abandoned for the High Country...Read more
The fatally over-confident hero of Good Murder returns to pit his meager detective skills against military intelligence, belligerent in-laws, a town full of G.I.s, and a creepy conspiracy to bring on an Australian sectarian nightmare. Failed Shakespearean actor and would-be private...Read more
Failed Shakesperean actor and would-be private investigator Will Power's unique detective skills are, once again, in demand. The Japanese army is rampaging through the islands of the South Pacific and Australia's front line of defence is a top-secret, crack division of men embedded deep in...Read more
A satire on life in small-town Australia, this clever murder mystery introduces William Power—actor, raconteur, and Shakespearean impresario. In 1942, with war raging in Europe and the Pacific, the Japanese army is on Australia's doorstep, and the small coastal Queensland town of...Read more