Australian Crime

ORGINAL 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 "send...

When eighteen-year-old Ellie Canning is discovered wandering the countryside, dazed and traumatized, she tells a harrowing story of abduction, captivity, and escape. An overnight symbol of survival and empowerment, Ellie enthralls an outraged nation. Then authorities zero in on an unlikely suspect: high school teacher Suzannah Wells, identified by Ellie as the woman who kept her drugged and bound in a basement. The evidence against Suzannah is damning—vilified by the media, Suzannah’s only defense is that not a single word Ellie says is true. Suzannah has no reason to lie.

Detective Sergeant Philip ‘Cato' Kwong is light on sleep but high on happiness with his new wife Sharon Wang and their baby girl. But contentment is not compatible with life in the Job, and soon a series of murders of Fremantle's homeless people gets in the way of Cato's newfound bliss. As New Wave journalist Norman Lip flirts online with the killer, it becomes apparent that these murders are personal—every death is bringing the killer one step closer to Cato.

Dorothy Davis and Kerry Whelan were both happy, healthy, affluent, middle-class women from conservative, loving families. Such women are hardly ever among the ranks of the missing. They were not hitchhikers, or associates of drug dealers, or unhappy with their family relationships, or suffering from mental health issues. Dorothy Davis and Kerry Whelan came from different parts of Sydney, mixed in quite different circles, and led completely different lives.

Sydney, the present: journalist Nick Eatwell has just lost his job, but his day is brightened when a fellow reporter, South African Susan Vidler, comes into his life looking for help with a story. Susan is chasing information about Nick's great-great uncle, Cyril Blake, who fought in the Anglo-Boer War and later joined the struggle for independence across the border in the German colony of South West Africa, now Namibia. A long-lost manuscript proves Nick's forebear was a somewhat reluctant hero.

Liz Porter's riveting casebook shows how forensic investigators - including pathologists, chemists, entomologists, DNA specialists and document examiners - have used their expertise in dozens of fascinating crimes and mysteries.

The crime of sextortion has reached epidemic proportions, fuelled by both sex offenders and organised scammers targeting our most vulnerable online. Children are some of the internet's most prolific and most naive users, and increasing numbers are finding themselves caught in an evil web of networked manipulators. Saving Our Kids highlights the dangers lurking in every child's smartphone, web browser and computer game.

The Australian Outback is a hot, remote, desolate place to die. Skeletal remains of several young women have been discovered in the bottom of a long-abandoned well, and major crime investigators Russell Foley and Sam Rose are assigned to the case. Foley and Rose soon learn a number of young backpackers, traveling around Australia on the adventure of a lifetime, have been reported missing in the area. Are these the remains of those unfortunate young women?

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.

The small town of Nannine lies in the harsh red interior of New South Wales. Once a thriving outback centre, years of punishing drought have whittled it down to no more than a couple of pubs and a police station. And its one sinister claim to fame: the still-unsolved disappearance of Evelyn McCreery 19 years ago from the bedroom she shared with her twin sister. Mina McCreery's life has been defined by the intense and ongoing public interest in her sister's case. Now an anxious and reclusive adult, Mina lives alone on her family's sunbaked destocked sheep farm.

In the autumn of 1992, two young women students at Melbourne University went to the police claiming that they had been indecently assaulted at a party. The man they accused was the head of their co-ed residential college. The controversial book that Helen Garner wrote about the resulting Ormond College sexual harassment case caused a social media storm. Prominent feminists were outraged at Garner's perceived support for the man involved, but many saw her approach a necessary and much welcome nuance towards the power dynamic between men and women.

In an incredible 25-year career as a homicide detective, Ron Iddles' conviction rate was 99 percent. Yet that only partly explains why Iddles is known to cops and crims alike as 'The Great Man'. Tough, inventive and incorruptible, stoic in the face of senseless horror yet unafraid to shed tears for a victim, Ron has applied his country cunning and city savvy to over 320 homicide cases - some of them the most infamous, compelling and controversial crimes in the nation's history. To the victims of crime, Ron is both a shoulder to cry on and an avenging angel.

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 to sign over his multi-million-dollar estate to her. When Mathew died in an apparent suicide soon afterwards, in a stranger-than-fiction twist, Natasha's estranged husband – who she was once charged with trying to kill – was the first paramedic on the scene.

When Tim Bowden went back to Tasmania to explore his state of origin for the first time in many years, he was reminded of his adolescent assertion that "Tasmania is the testicle of Australia, suffusing the mainland with strength and vigour. What a pity there is only one of them".

When three teenagers stumble upon a body in dense bushland one rainy Friday night, Senior Sergeant Mark Ariti's hopes for a quiet posting in his old home town are shattered. The victim is Aidan Sleeth, a local property developer, whose controversial plans to buy up Blackwood land means few are surprised he ended up dead. However his gruesome murder is overshadowed by the mystery consuming the entire nation: the disappearance of Detective Sergeant Natalie Whitsted.

When 25-year-old Bella Michaels is brutally murdered in the small town of Strathdee, the community is stunned, and a media storm descends. Unwillingly thrust into the eye of that storm is Bella's beloved older sister, Chris, a barmaid at the local pub, whose apparent easygoing nature conceals hard-won wisdom and the kind of street smarts only experience can bring. As Chris is plunged into despair and searches for answers, reasons, explanation - anything - that could make even the smallest sense of Bella's death, her ex-husband, friends and neighbours do their best to support her.

After an election upheaval, Dominic Cochrane decides it's time to leave his twenty-year political staffer career behind. He opts to stay in a friend's converted waterside boatshed in a quiet bay in a Sydney backwater. The long-time neighbours take Dom into their fold, but his peaceful retreat is quickly upended as he becomes embroiled in a tragic mystery. As money sharks circle treasured family homes in the secluded community, tensions mount as their way of life is threatened, secrets are exposed and old wounds reopened.

This is a heart-wrenching collection of true stories told through the eyes of family members who have experienced the trauma of a missing loved one. It follows their journeys from the desperate searches in the first days, through the Police investigations and, in many cases, the heartbreak as the years roll by without any news. These stories are just a glimpse into ten of the thousands of missing persons still out there, waiting to be found.

Under the fierce heat of the Australian outback, the laws of nature serve a rough justice. When a man vanishes deep in the Northern Territory, local police write it off. But his family suspect otherwise—and when the call for help goes out, Ben Hope and Jeff Decker are there to hear it. Ben’s instincts, honed by years of Special Forces missions, soon see the story told by a trail of bullet casings, rumours of a missing map and a lethal cocktail of greed, power and money.

An unprecedented spate of murders in the 1990s earned Goulburn Jail the ominous name 'The Killing Fields'. Inmates sentenced or transferred to the 130-year-old towering menace declared they had been given death sentences. Serial killer Ivan Milat, the 'Terror Five' militants who plotted attacks across Sydney in 2005, Brothers 4 Life founder Bassam Hamzy and gang rapist Bilal Skaf are just a few of the inmates inside Australia's most murderous prison. Meet them all here in Phelps' best-selling audiobook.