Australian Crime Fiction

A spate of seemingly unconnected murders in southern England prompt a high-profile task force to be formed and led by DCI Jack Hawksworth, one of the Force's new rising stars who combines modern methods with old-school instincts. The victims appear as disparate as their style of death; the only link that Hawk and his team can pull together is that the murdered are all men of an identical age. The task force has nothing but cold cases of decades past to comb through in the hope that they might find a clue to who is behind the savagery.

Jamie lives in Dalton's Bay with Aunty Dawn and Uncle Bobby. He spends his downtime hanging out with his mates, Dally and Lenny. Mark Cassidy and his white mates - the Footy Heads - take every opportunity they can to bully Jamie and his friends. On Lenny's last night in town before moving to Sydney, after another episode of racist harassment, Jamie, Dally and Lenny decide to retaliate by vandalising Mark Cassidy's car. And when they discover the keys are in the ignition… Dally changes the plan.

Attorney Rhonda Bird returns home after a long estrangement when she learns her father has died. There she makes two important discoveries: her father stopped being an accountant and had opened up a private detective agency, and she has a teenage half-sister named Baby. Baby brings in a client to the detective agency - a young man who claims he was abducted the night before. Soon, Rhonda and Baby are entangled in a bizarre yet dangerous case.

Detective Rebecca Giles has just finished interviewing aging petty crim Sticky Pete over a spate of break-and-enters when a disturbing new report comes in. Twelve-year-old Kayleen Ellis has vanished from her home in Muswellbrook in the Upper Hunter Valley. Hours later, Giles is a local hero, having apparently solved Kayleen's case and the spate of jewellery thefts. Yet the hangover from her celebrations has barely kicked in when the body of young jillaroo Ava Emmerson is discovered in gruesome circumstances on a nearby farm.

When Rebecca Bundy fails to return home after the last day of school in 1984 her father reports her missing. But the teenager has run away before and recently she's been bragging about going to Queensland, so the police tell the family to wait it out. Days pass. Rumours swirl. A man seen loitering near the bus stop might have followed her. Was there something going on between Rebecca and a male teacher? What about the sheep farmer on Glen Lochan Road where she babysat? And why is her boyfriend, the rough cattle guy Bull Tennant, so sure something sinister has happened?

When Jenny Williams took a job as the new constable in an outback opal mining town, she thought she’d be hunting down clues to find her missing aunt and cousin. But when a young woman’s body is found at the bottom of a mine shaft, a possible murder forces her personal agenda to take a back seat. Jenny goes head to head with her new commanding officer. He doesn’t want to ruffle feathers in town and rules the case Death By Misadventure. But Jenny is sure the dead woman met with foul play.

My name's Ernest Cunningham. I used to be a fan of reading Golden Age murder mysteries, until I found myself with a haphazard career getting stuck in the middle of real-life ones. I'd hoped, this Christmas, that any self-respecting murderer would kick their feet up and take it easy over the holidays. I was wrong.

Someone wants Russian millionaire Dmitry Lebedev dead. After years flying under the radar in Sydney, he’s just had a narrow escape when a sex worker is poisoned in his hotel room. In desperation he contacts his former CIA case officer, Ronnie Johnson, offering to expose a traitor inside the Australian government in return for protection.

In the scorching heat of Alice Springs, where temperatures regularly exceed 40°C, Detective Senior Constable Sarah Reeves is called to investigate when gallery owner Maxwell Reid is found dead among his prized Aboriginal artworks. What begins as an apparent poisoning soon reveals a sophisticated art forgery operation exploiting indigenous artists and their cultural heritage. When evidence points to multiple suspects—from rival gallery owners to exploited Aboriginal artists with legitimate grievances—Sarah must navigate both the brutal summer heat and the closed ranks of a town where ...

When an earthquake causes a breach at a super-secret Pharos prison, Kensy and Max must join an urgent assignment to Queenstown, New Zealand. Time is of the essence—the escaped prisoners are two highly dangerous men out for revenge against both Pharos and the Spencer family. The twins head into the wilderness in pursuit. But the mountains are dangerous, and instability brought on by the earthquake is only making things worse. Meanwhile, strange things are happening back in London as one Pharos agent is attacked and another disappears.

ORIGINAL STORY - WRITTEN BY A HUMAN This intriguing prequel novella introduces Detective Ange Watson, tracing her first steps into the world of crime-solving and revealing how she became the tenacious investigator readers will grow to love. A Routine Case… or the Start of Something Deadly? Constable Ange Watson’s policing career is fast unravelling. After calling out a superior for recklessly putting her life at risk, she’s been sidelined, labelled as a whinger, left questioning whether she even belongs in the force. With her resignation email drafted and her finger hovering over "...

Will Trent is undercover at Fort Knox. His assignment: to investigate a 22-year-old murder. His suspect's name: Jack Reacher. Jack Reacher is in Fort Knox on his own mission: to bring down a dangerous criminal ring operating at the heart of America’s military. Except now Will Trent is on the scene. But there’s a bigger conspiracy at play - one that neither the special agent nor the ex-military cop could have anticipated.

Detective Senior Constable Riley Murphy thought Lightning Ridge was career exile—a remote opal mining town where the biggest crimes were petty theft and neighbourly disputes. Then respected opal dealer Elena Kozlov is found brutally murdered in her ransacked workshop, and Riley's routine investigation spirals into something far more dangerous. Elena wasn't killed for her valuable stones—she was eliminated for asking the wrong questions about suspicious corporate activity. As Riley digs deeper, she uncovers Asset Beta, a covert operative who's been surveilling Lightning Ridge residents ...

DCI Jack Hawksworth is back, working on a high-profile case breaking in London. A calculating serial killer is on the loose, committing the most gruesome of murders as he 'trophies' the faces of his victims. With each new atrocity, the public and police force are getting more desperate for results. Hawk pulls together a strong and experienced task force who soon find themselves caught up in a murky world of illegal immigrants and human organ trading.

The small town of Neapolis is being torn apart by a devastating rape trial. The town's golden boy, a swimmer destined for Olympic greatness, has been accused of raping a high school student, the beloved granddaughter of the police chief. Under pressure to make Season Three of her true-crime podcast a success, Rachel throws herself into interviewing and investigating - but the mysterious letters keep showing up in unexpected places. Someone is following her, and she won't stop until Rachel finds out what happened to her sister 25 years ago.

Inti Flynn arrives in Scotland with her twin sister, Aggie, to lead a team of biologists tasked with reintroducing 14 grey wolves into the remote Highlands. She hopes to heal not only the dying landscape, but Aggie, too, unmade by the terrible secrets that drove the sisters out of Alaska. Inti is not the woman she once was, either, changed by the harm she's witnessed - inflicted by humans on both the wild and each other. Yet as the wolves surprise everyone by thriving, Inti begins to let her guard down, even opening herself up to the possibility of love.

It's January 1983. During his university summer break, Ryan Bradley returns to the remote town of Nashville in New Zealand's rugged King Country. It's a bittersweet trip: he's working long, punishing hours as a woolpresser, he needs to sell his late mother's house, and he's increasingly feeling like an outcast in his childhood town. But mostly he's haunted by memories of Sanna Sovernen, a Finnish backpacker and his secret lover, who worked with him in the shearing shed the summer before - then vanished without trace.

Detective Jason Smith is sick and tired of the English weather. It's February in York and the dark, dreary days are getting him down. When his wife, DC Erica Whitton wins a holiday to Australia, Smith is reluctant to go. He has no desire to go back home. Against his better judgement, Smith agrees to show his wife and daughter where he grew up. The perfect holiday soon turns into a nightmare as Smith finds himself in a race against time to save the only people he's ever cared about. Children in Smith's home town are being murdered. There's something rotten there.

When the Australian Mystery Writers' Society invited me to their crime-writing festival aboard the Ghan, the famous train between Darwin and Adelaide, I was hoping for some inspiration for my second book. Fiction, this time: I needed a break from real people killing each other. Obviously, that didn't pan out. The program is a who's who of crime-writing royalty. But when one of us is murdered, six authors quickly turn into five detectives. Together, we should know how to solve a crime. Or commit one.

A notorious unmarked track through outback Australia, the 'Wire' crosses slabs of lawless land, body-dumping grounds and mobile phone blackspots. Harvey Buck is certainly desperate. Racing to be with his dying girlfriend, he encounters Clare Holland, whose car has broken down. He offers the hapless traveller a ride. And then their nightmare begins. The pair are ambushed by a vengeful crew - and strapped into bomb vests. As part of a deadly game, Harvey and Clare are forced to commit a series of increasingly murderous missions - or be blown to smithereens.