Sorted on book title (not in series order)
A serial killer's work goes unnoticed until Detective Berlin is on the case in this third spine-tingling Charlie Berlin novel.
It's 1967, the summer of love, and in swinging Melbourne Detective Sergeant Charlie Berlin has been hauled out of exile in the Fraud...Read more
In his most dazzling and brilliant novel since An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears tells the story of John Stone, financier and armaments manufacturer, a man so wealthy that in the years before World War One he was able to manipulate markets, industries and indeed whole countries and...Read more
In the third instalment of the Le Fanu Mystery series, the intrepid superintendent is promoted to Inspector-General of Police in 1920s Madras, which proves to be more boring than he had envisaged. Instead of pushing papers across his desk, Le Fanu focuses on the disappearance of a senior...Read more
It's January 1943. Australia is at war and Perth is buzzing.
US troops have permanently docked in the city in what local men refer to bitterly as the American occupation, and Perth women are having the time of their lives. The Americans have money, accents like movie stars,...Read more
London, June 1940. When the body of silent screen star Mabel Morgan is found impaled on railings in Fitrovia, the coroner rules her death as suicide, but DI Ted Stratton of the CID is not convinced. Despite opposition from his superiors, he starts asking questions and it becomes clear...Read more
London 1887: a year of Continental anarchist- and American-financed Fenian violence. The suspicious death of Patrick O’Rorke’s boyhood friend Tom O’Brien – the internationally famous tenor known as Tomaso Briani – propels the former colonial detective into dangerous places when he is called...Read more
When a teenage girl and boy go missing from Mitchell everyone has a theory about what happened to them. Most in town think they’re runaways. Others suspect their families or marijuana growers as rumours and gossip abound in the orchards and farms of Victoria’s northern plains. But when the...Read more
It is 1906 and Will Prior is in self-imposed exile on a remote South Pacific island, working a small, and failing, plantation. He should never have told anyone about his previous existence as a military foot policeman in the Boer War, but a man needs friends, even if they are as stuffy and...Read more
Dorset, 1642. England is on the cusp of civil war.
Jayne Swift, a daughter of the Dorset gentry, has resisted all offers of marriage and instead trained as a physician, using her skills to tend to her Royalist father's tenants and the local population. When civil war sweeps...Read more
The year is 1900, and photographer Beatrix Spencer has just opened her photographic studio in the bustling colonial metropolis of Sydney. But it is a turbulent time to start a new business. A deadly outbreak of bubonic plague is threatening the city, causing public panic, putting ships into...Read more
It's 1593 and London is a city on edge. Under threat from plague and war, it's a desperate place where strangers are unwelcome and severed heads grin from spikes on Tower Bridge. Playwright, poet and spy, Christopher Marlowe has three days to live. Three days in which he confronts dangerous...Read more
In April 1942, Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew, is forcibly transported to the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. When his captors discover that he speaks several languages, he is put to work as a Tätowierer (the German word for tattooist), tasked with permanently marking his fellow...Read more
In fear for his life, American millionaire Daniel Cartwright changes his will, appointing his old friend Rowland Sinclair as his executor.
Soon murder proves that fear well founded.
When Rowland receives word of Cartwright's death, he sets out immediately for...Read more
Big-hearted, moving and richly rewarding, That Deadman Dance is set in the first decades of the 19th century in the area around what is now Albany, Western Australia. In playful, musical prose, the book explores the early contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people and the first European...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
1943 is a dangerous time to fall in love...
In wartime Melbourne loose lips sink ships, so when Australian Women's Army sergeant Stella Aldridge overhears soldiers whispering about a revenge killing, she follows her instincts to investigate, despite finding herself drawn to one...Read more
Melbourne, 1960: Mrs Blayney and her twelve year old son live in South Richmond. At least, they did, until their house burnt down. The prime suspect - one Keith Aloysius Gonzaga Kavanagh, also aged 12 - has mysteriously disappeared. Our narrator, the Blayney kid, sets off on a covert...Read more
1945: The war's over. But there are no medals for Danny McRae. Just amnesia and blackouts; twin handicaps for a private investigator with an upper-class client on the hook for murder.
Danny's blackouts mean that hours, sometimes days, are a complete blank. So when news of a...Read more
Based on a true story…
At midnight on 28 December 1864, in the Australian gold-mining town of Daylesford, young newly-wed Maggie Stuart lies dead in her own blood. Rumour and xenophobia drive speculation over the identity of her killer, and when a suspect is apprehended, police...Read more
Not all murder victims are mourned, but the perpetrator must always be punished ...
For Robert Church, superintendent of the Parramatta Female Factory, the most enjoyable part of his job is access to young convict women.Inmate Grace O'Leary has made it her...Read more
n the heat of the St Petersburg summer of 1868, a doctor's wife and son are found dead, victims of a suspected poisoning. The doctor is arrested, but when further bodies are discovered it sets investigator Porfiry Petrovich on a thrilling and dangerous chase through the dark heart of the...Read more
Will the Archbishop of York's final days be spent in peace? As the race to be his successor gathers pace, Owen must catch a determined killer who dwells among the archbishop's guests at Bishopthorpe Palace.
York, 1373: While the...Read more
It’s the height of the Cold War, and as the Great Fog rolls in over London, a man meets his death in the icy shallows of the Long Water. Some say he was just drunk, wandering through Hyde Park. But for Scotland Yard’s new detective, Herbert Smith, the body will lead to a far more...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
1943 – Bletchley Park, England
Mae Webster, immersed in the clandestine world of codebreaking at Bletchley Park, is recruited to help unveil a spy who’s on the brink of exposing Britain's most guarded secret, the cracking of the Enigma code. As war rages...Read more
The year is 1838, and after more than ten years in the planning, the famous United States Exploring Expedition is set to launch into uncharted waters from the coast of Virginia. A convoy of seven ships filled with astronomers, mapmakers, naturalists, and the sailors charged with getting...Read more
Edinburgh, 1847. City of Medicine, Money, Murder.
Young women are being discovered dead across the Old Town, all having suffered similarly gruesome ends. In the New Town, medical student Will Raven is about to start his apprenticeship with the brilliant and...Read more
Prize winning author of seven books, Philip McLaren returns to the historical novel after an absence of 22 years. Based on research that is noted in his bibliography, he presents this controversial story about ‘Toby’, a respected black horseman from the Snowy River. He tells the story using...Read more
Paris, 1937. Luke Hamilton - a junior air intelligence officer at the British Embassy - finds himself the target of an assassination attempt. A clear case of mistaken identity, or so it first appears. As Luke is hunted across a continent sliding towards war, he comes to learn that the...Read more
1943 - Winton, Southland, New Zealand. Marine Randolph Harrington, the charismatic and handsome saxophonist of a visiting United States Marines jazz band, is found murdered by the banks of the Oreti River.Read more