Australian Fiction Mysteries

In war-torn Syria, a massacre survivor is pulled from beneath a pile of bodies. She is given one instruction: 'find Jed Walker'. Walker is ex-CIA - a man who thought he was long out of the game. Discovering a terror outfit is running people-smuggling from the Middle East and into the United States, he is drawn back in to fight their evil trade. At first Walker thinks these human traffickers are driven purely by profit and greed. But it is much worse than that - and it has ties to the highest levels of power.

Book 1 - Silkworm Secrets Series 'The ancient trees with their rough bark wrap around me like silk cocoons. Their solid trunks and tendril roots grip the ground as if to say, I will hold you, I will not let go.' In the 1960s the rural suburbs of Brisbane should have been an idyllic place for Ruby and Bobby to grow up. Their treehouse retreat, set high in a mulberry tree is a place to share friendship and watch the events of the yards nearby. However as the two become teenagers, the naive Ruby is exposed to the sinister events that Bobby has to deal with in his family life. As the years pass...

ORIGINAL STORY, WRITTEN BY A HUMAN The irrepressible Detective Ange Watson is back for the gripping second instalment of the Saltwater Crimes Trilogy. Ange’s return to her beat in Byron Bay certainly doesn’t go to plan. Some deep soul searching is needed when her reputation is left in tatters. Her fixation on the criminal syndicate behind the Namba Heads tragedies leads her to adopt the persona of a shady cop and head north to the glittering Gold Coast. All that glitters is definitely not gold! With some newfound surf buddies to keep her company and aided by a surprising and thrilling ...

In 1936, intrepid young Australian journalist Nancy Wake is living in Paris after witnessing firsthand the terror of Hitler’s rise in Europe, firing her resolve to join the fight to defeat the Nazis. When Nancy falls in love with a handsome French industrialist, no sooner has she become Mrs. Henri Fiocca than the Germans invade and Nancy adopts another name, a codename - the first of many.

Jack goes on a second honeymoon and encounters raging floods, a hot air balloon that goes ballistic, and a car that is sinking in quicksand. He goes back to work where it's safe and is accosted by a Bikie with a grudge. There is a fight, Jacks beaten to a pulp, but he's the last man standing. Then he collapses. He undergoes emergency surgery and must contemplate life in a wheelchair! If that isn't enough he has to cope with a high school reunion that goes badly wrong, a gun toting husband and an unhinged scientist with a nuclear bomb. It takes all Jack's resourcefulness, his ability to ...

In the bustling heart of Sydney, where the iconic harbour ferry connects the city's shores, Detective Sergeant Natalie Campbell is called to investigate when a body is pulled from the water - an apparent suicide that doesn't add up. What begins as a straightforward drowning soon reveals something far darker lurking beneath the surface of Sydney's corporate world. When the victim is identified as David Garton, a quiet accountant whose meticulous nature led him to discover financial irregularities at his shipping company, Natalie must navigate both the complex currents of Sydney Harbour and ...

You have been given access to secret files buried deep within the archives. Disturbing stories never meant for the light of day. Stories of evil grandparents and unsettling homework. A string of deaths, seemingly unrelated. Walls squirm, as if alive. A cursed wish comes true. Ordinary people behave oddly, even family and your closest friends. These stories share a common fate. All the children are met with tragedy. Coincidence? Or could these nightmares be connected by something more sinister than you dare to imagine? A dark and chilling mystery awaits.

For half a lifetime, journalist Martin Scarsden has run from his past. But now there is no escaping. He'd vowed never to return to his hometown, Port Silver, and its traumatic memories. But now his new partner, Mandy Blonde, has inherited an old house in the seaside town, and Martin knows their chance of a new life together won't come again. Martin arrives to find his best friend from school days brutally murdered and Mandy the chief suspect. With the police curiously reluctant to pursue other suspects, Martin goes searching for the killer. And finds the past waiting for him.

Everyone in the small town of Thorncombe knows the tales of the haunted woods where the birds don’t sing and a girl in a white dress roams, luring people to their deaths. But when a girl in white is found dead the morning after Halloween, her body carefully arranged at the bottom of an old stone folly, the community is thrown into turmoil.

Evelyn Varley has always been ambitious and clever. As a girl, she earned a scholarship to a prestigious academy well above her parents’ means, gaining her a best friend from one of England’s wealthiest families. In 1939, with an Oxford degree in hand and war looming, Evelyn finds herself recruited into an elite MI5 counterintelligence unit. A secret society seeks an alliance with Germany and, posing as a Nazi sympathizer, Evelyn must build a case to expose their treachery. But as she is drawn deeper into duplicity, some of those close to her become embroiled in her investigation.

It's night, and the walls of Rachel's home creak in the darkness of the Australian bush. Her fear of other people has led her to a reclusive life as far from them as possible, her only occasional contact with her sister. A hammering on the door. There stand a mother, Hannah, and her sick baby. They are running for their lives from a mysterious death sweeping the Australian countryside - so soon, too soon, after everything.

For more than 150 years, a grand house known as Alden Castle has stood proudly in the rolling hills of California's wine country, home to a family weighed down by secrets and debt. When the castle is sold, billionaire developers move in, only to discover one skeleton after another—including a fresh corpse—rotting in the old family cemetery. As three generations of the well-respected Alden-Stowe family come under scrutiny, police unearth a twisted web of rivalries, alliances, deceit, and treachery. Who lied? Who will survive? Who, amid all the horror and betrayal, is the lucky one?

Ex-mercenary Sonja Kurtz is out for revenge after her daughter Emma is assaulted by an abalone poacher while on a beachside holiday near Cape Town. When the poacher is murdered, Sonja is targeted by a violent local gangster and must flee the country. As Sonja leaves a trail of destruction in her wake—from the threatened wilderness of Zimbabwe to the treacherous beaches of northern Mozambique—a concerned Emma must find the courage to rescue her mother. But is Sonja a cold-blooded killer? Or is there a darker conspiracy taking place in southern Africa's underworld?

Superstar footballer Luca Bruni is being blackmailed for a night of lust he swears he didn't participate in...except the ransom photo denies that. A media darling on and off the field, he has powerful charisma, a perfect home life he'll do anything to protect, and more money than he knows what to do with. He's determined to defy the extortion racket. When Detective Superintendent Jack Hawksworth learns that the cunning mastermind behind this crime has already swindled a dozen of the world's most highly prized male athletes, he is instructed to keep the situation from escalating.

Lenny Marks is good at not remembering. She has spent the last twenty years not thinking about the day her mother left her when she was still a child. Her stepfather's parting words, however, remain annoyingly unforgettable: 'You did this.' Now thirty-seven, Lenny prefers contentment and order over the unreliability of happiness and the messiness of relationships. She fills her days teaching at the local primary school, and her nights playing Scrabble with her pretend housemate, watching reruns of Friends and rearranging her thirty-six copies of The Hobbit.

Charlie Truganini can’t believe his eyes when on a trip into Tasmania’s wilderness he sees a Tasmanian tiger – a carnivorous marsupial considered by most Australians to be extinct. Charlie has a number of claims to fame – one of those being he’s a direct descendant of one Truganini, the woman considered to be the last full-blooded Aboriginal Tasmanian and whose name he inherited. A close second to that is he’s the great-grandson of one Dingo Truganini, the tracker who helped capture the last known Thylacine cynocephalus – an animal better known as the Tasmanian tiger. It’s ...

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.

Jack West Jr has made it to the Supreme Labyrinth. Now he faces one last race - against multiple rivals, against time, against the collapse of the universe itself - a headlong race that will end at a throne inside the fabled labyrinth. But the road will be hard. For this is a maze like no other: a maze of mazes.

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.

All Hanna Fischer ever wanted to do was to study physics under the great Albert Einstein. But when, as a teenager in 1919, her life is suddenly turned upside-down, she is catapulted into a new and extraordinary life - as a secretary, a scientist, a sister and a spy. From racist gangs in Berlin to gangsters in New York City, Nazis in the 1930s and Hitler's inner circle during the Second World War, Hanna will encounter some of history's greatest minds and most terrible moments, all while desperately trying to stay alive.