Who hanged the headmaster in the playground on the night of the school Hallowe'en party? Almost everyone in Heppleburn either hated or feared the viper-tongued Harold Medburn.
Inspector Ramsay is convinced it was the headmaster's enigmatic wife, but Jack Robson, school governor...Read more
What if justice isn't enough?
Schalk Lourens got out his phone and started filming, something Pieterse taught him years ago. Keep a record. Do it yourself, boykie, every time. That way you can be sure. Cover your arse. Don't trust any of them.
Schalk began...Read more
He is a record collector — a connoisseur of vinyl, hunting out rare and elusive LPs. His business card describes him as the “Vinyl Detective” and some people take this more literally than others.
Like the beautiful, mysterious woman who wants to pay him a large sum of money to...Read more
Astrologer, fortuneteller, and self-styled detective Kiyoshi Mitarai must in one week solve a mystery that has baffled Japan for 40 years. Who murdered the artist Umezawa, raped and killed his daughter, and then chopped up the bodies of six others to create Azoth, the supreme woman? With...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
A woman wants her errant husband tracked, an undocumented Cambodian girl is found dead, the city’s two biggest criminal societies vie for power, a loan shark wants his money back, and a corrupt cop is pulling strings from the shadows. It’s just another day in Hong Kong.
Former...Read more
Slough House is Jackson Lamb’s kingdom; a dumping ground for members of the intelligence service who’ve screwed up: left a secret file on a train, blown surveillance, or become drunkenly unreliable. They’re the service’s poor relations – the slow horses – and bitterest among them is River...Read more
A remote island. A brutal murder. A secret hidden in the past . . .
In the middle of the North Sea, between the UK and Denmark, lies the beautiful and rugged island nation of Doggerland.
Detective Inspector Karen Eiken Hornby has returned to the main island, Heimö...Read more
Taukiri was born into sorrow. Auē can be heard in the sound of the sea he loves and hates, and in the music he draws out of the guitar that was his father’s. It spills out of the gang violence that killed his father and sent his mother into hiding, and the shame he feels about abandoning...Read more
In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders.
But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim...Read more
A DETECTIVE IN SEARCH OF THE TRUTH
Hana Westerman is a tenacious Ma¯ori detective juggling single motherhood and the pressures of her career in Auckland’s Central Investigation Branch. When she’s led to a crime scene by a mysterious video, she discovers a man hanging in a...Read more
In a small rural community north-west of Sydney, park ranger, Cal Nyx, finds a badly decomposed body in the bush. When the remains are identified as someone she once knew, the police treat her as a suspect. Cal, a tough and canny woman, needs to find the killer and convince the...Read more
A summer of relentless heat. A local surfer named Ray Carlson is found dead in a house not far from Portsea back beach. There’s a silver-handled kitchen knife deep in his chest, and blood everywhere.
Detective Sergeant Zoe Mayer is scarcely back from extended leave, and still...Read more
It all unraveled at the funeral...
Horace Reid's death opened the door to our freedom. His widow, Elizabeth, exists only on paper. She disappeared thirty years ago. It's us, the Tribe, who live in her body now. But nobody knows that. Us are Elise, the reluctant...Read more
Detective Constable Ash Henderson has a dark secret…
Five years ago his daughter, Rebecca, went missing on the eve of her thirteenth birthday. A year later the first card arrived: homemade, with a Polaroid picture stuck to the front – Rebecca, strapped to a chair, gagged and...Read more
Eliza Dacey was murdered in cold blood.
Four years later, the world watched it unfold again on screen.
Producer Jack Quick knows how to frame a story. So says Curtis Wade, the subject of Jack’s new true crime docuseries, convicted of a young woman’s murder four years...Read more
There may be troubles ahead...Northern Ireland. Spring 1981. Hunger strikes. Riots. Power cuts. A homophobic serial killer with a penchant for opera. And a young woman's suicide that may yet turn out to be murder.Read more
Welcome to Alderley, a magnificent mansion in the heart of the West Country where a grand house party is taking place. The preparations have been made, the guests have been invited, and the staff are on hand. What could possibly go wrong? Let the entertainment begin.
The theft of...Read more
According to the author's notes at the end of the novel LYREBIRD, the idea for this story came on a walk in the bush one day, when Caro crossed paths with a lyrebird. Having previously lived in an area where the sounds heard never quite seemed to match what was going on around us, it's not...Read more
Mounted Trooper Augustus Hawkins was introduced to readers in Fioretti's first novel, BONE LANDS. Returned from active service in the Boer War, he's scarred physically and mentally, tortured by what happened in combat, damaged again by the love he found in the first novel having been...Read more
Originally published in 2022, this is a series that slipped past me, but something drew my attention to the setting mostly, and after this last awful summer, reading about Mallee towns in the heat sounded like a fictional pursuit that might distract from the reality outside the door....Read more
Not for a moment would this reviewer wish to suggest that this is a time in history when the murder of an obnoxious rich person, on a luxury island, busily engaged in being obnoxious and threatening to all and sundry is an enjoyable idea, but it did come across, in this novel, as...Read more
TRIGGER WARNING: Addresses foster and orphaned children and child abuse, as well as animal abuse - see expansion below.
The second DI Nyree Bradshaw novel from Catherine Lea, this is a police procedural styled series that is strong on character and sense of place, and no slouch...Read more
The opening line of HUMIDITY made me laugh:
Word gets 'round when you're a nude model in a small country town.
That would most definitely get around our nearby small country town, even though it could never be said that we have the...Read more
Between 1865 and 1910 Mary Fortune wrote over 500 crime stories, set in the Victorian goldfields, Melbourne and the outback. Published initially in newspapers and the like, they form the first detective fiction series written by a woman, although she was published under a series of pseudonyms hiding both her real identity and her gender from the wider world.Read more
A standalone from the author of the well-known Gemma Woodstock series, THE HOUSEMATE is a story told in two timelines. Back to nine years ago when three housemates were sharing a property, one of them is killed, one goes missing, one is accused of murder. The current timeline sees...Read more
Ten years ago six teenagers hiked into the wilderness and five of them came back alive. They were school friends. Ed (whose family farm was their starting off point), Hugh, Charlotte, Laura, Jack and Alex, close, but with the sorts of slightly complicated romantic attachments and fractures that you find in groups of kids of that age. Nobody for a moment thought that this would be a dangerous hike, they were experienced walkers, fit, and Ed knew this area from a childhood growing up here. Only Ed died, and for the ten years since his mother Mary has had plenty of time to think about her beloved only child's death.Read more
A slow burner novel, THE GRAPEVINE is the tale of a murder from the perspective of its fallout in a small suburban community in Canberra, in 1979.
It's also a breathtakingly clever takedown of much of what remains flat out stupid - xenophobia, racism, homophobia, misogyny, and...Read more
In her new novel, Panic, Catherine Jinks provides a timely take on online mobs, conspiracy theorists, and sovereign citizens.
...Read more