Australian Mystery

After a disastrous fire in the village leaves a family without a home, Alice-Miranda and her friends pitch in to help. They decide to hold a music festival to raise funds. The only trouble is, not everyone's as keen on the idea. Things are also heating up in Winchesterfield-Downsfordvale Academy for Proper Young Ladies with Miss Reedy at the helm. The arrival of a new teacher, a deputy turned diva and an entire faculty of disgruntled staff sees tempers flare. Has the power gone to Miss Reedy's head or is there a sinister hand at play?

Called in to examine what is left of a body struck by lightning, Tempe traces an unusual tattoo to its source and is soon embroiled in a much larger case. Young men – tourists – have been disappearing on the islands of Turks and Caicos for years. Seven years ago, the first victim was found in a strange location with both hands cut off; the other visitors vanished without a trace. But, recently, tantalising leads have emerged and only Tempe can unravel them.

Maitland 1913. Miss Elizabeth Quinn is something of an institution in Maitland Town. For longer than anyone could remember she and her brother, businessman Michael, have lived in the impressive two-story stone house next to the church. When she is discovered cowering in the corner of the exhibition gallery at the Technical College the entire town knows something strange has come to pass. Was it the prehistoric remains or perhaps the taxidermy exhibition that had reduced the whale-boned encased pillar of society to a quivering mess? Or something about a striking painting on loan?

A whirlwind romance. When Theodora Scott met Connor - wealthy, charming, and a member of the powerful Dalton family - she fell in love in an instant. Six months later, he's brought her to Idlewood, his family's isolated winter retreat, to win over his skeptical relatives. Stay away from Connor Dalton. Theo has tried to ignore the threatening messages on her phone, but she can't ignore the footprints in the snow outside her window or the cabin's strange familiar feeling. Then, Theo finds something impossible: a photo of herself as a child. A photo taken at Idlewood.

Emma Cameron, a recently divorced farmer and a local in Barker, runs Deception Creek, the farm that three generations of her family have owned before her. Every day, Emma pushes herself hard on the land, hoping to make 10-year-old memories of a terrible car accident disappear. And now, there are more recent nightmares of an ex-husband who refuses to understand how much the farm means to Emma. When Joel Hammond is released from jail and heads home to Barker, Detective Dave Burrows and his officer, Senior Sergeant Jack Higgins, are on high alert.

Deep in the middle of the Nevada desert, the Xymos Corporation has built a state-of-the-art fabrication plant, surrounded by miles and miles of nothing but cactus and coyote. Eight people are trapped inside because outside, waiting for them, looking for them, is a self-replicating, fast-evolving swarm made up of predatory molecules that they themselves created. On a singular level, the molecules are seemingly harmless, but massed together, they form an intelligent organism that is anything but benign. They must find a way to stop this creature before it gets inside.

The first drops start to fall when Quinn spies the body. With no reception and nothing but an empty road for miles, does she stop to help or keep driving to safety? Back at the iconic country pub where Quinn works, Andrea is sandbagging the place in preparation for heavy rains. Alone with her sleeping son in the back room, she reluctantly lets a biker in to wait out the storm. Out on the wet roads, tensions arise among four backpackers on their way to Darwin. They haven’t prepared for this kind of weather and the flooding isn’t the only threat on the horizon.

In this thrilling sequel, Melissa, a lawyer turned successful podcaster, has recently married a man whose first wife died tragically, leaving him and their young daughter, Riley, behind. While Melissa and her brother, Mike, help their mother relocate to the idyllic Hamptons, Melissa’s new stepdaughter goes missing. Drawing on the experience of their own abduction, Melissa and Mike race to find Riley to save her from the trauma they still struggle with—or worse.

Julija, the trusting daughter of the chief of Sarajevo police, becomes the unwitting accomplice of the man who sparks the First World War by assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand. As more and more nations join the conflict Julija must face the part she played in causing the ever-increasing loss of human life. Searching for redemption Julija dedicates herself to the care of wounded soldiers and, in a wretched field hospital on the Gallipoli peninsular, meets the one man who can finally help her understand why she has been eternally cursed for the sins of her past.

Small animals – a rat, a rabbit, a squirrel – have been turning up throughout Charlotte, North Carolina, mutilated and displayed in the same bizarre manner. But one day, as Tempe is relaxing at home alongside her aimless, moody great-niece Tory, she’s diverted by a disturbing call. Now, it seems, the perp is upping the ante. This find is larger. Could the remains be human?

Finn and her best friend, Daphne, have grown up together in a small town in the Blue Mountains, NSW. Bonded by both having lost a younger sister to suicide, they've always had a close - sometimes too close - friendship. Now in their twenties, their lives have finally started to diverge: Daphne is at university and Finn is working in the Mountains, as well as falling in love with a beautiful newcomer called Magdu. Unused to sharing Finn, Daphne starts to act up in ways that will allow her to maintain the control over her best friend she's always relished.

Eleanor Jones has just started at her ninth high school in less than five years. Since she and her mum are always moving on, Eleanor likes to stay on the outer, to stay invisible. So maybe it's just bad luck that the very first person she talks to at Cooinda Secondary College, Angus Marshall, is stabbed and left for dead the same day. The last message on Angus's phone is from Eleanor Jones.

Aboard a luxury passenger train in the desolate Russian Far East, Slater heads for the port city of Vladivostok with a mysterious grudge. After traumatic past events, he was reluctant to return to the region, but he’s got unfinished business to attend to. Terrified passengers, secret police, and shadowy underworld figures are just the beginning. Arriving in Vladivostok, he finds something wretched–something dark, twisted and shocking.

A young woman's quest to heal a family rift entangles her in one of Australia's greatest historical puzzles when an intricately illustrated map offers a clue to the fate of a long-lost girl. A mesmerizing historical mystery set in the Hunter Valley from best-selling author Tea Cooper for fans of Natasha Lester and Kate Morton.

A near-fatal car accident left Jane Halifax in a coma, and when she wakes, she has no idea who she is...Initially comforted by unlikely specters of past cases, Jane has no memory of the accident and is unaware of everyone else’s concerns: the police, who believe she was deliberately run off the road; the lawyer, whose files were in her car at the time of the accident—files he never should have given her; her neurosurgeon, who fears a relapse; and her partner, Tim, who is slowly realizing Jane remembers nothing of the last two years—including their relationship.

Of all the nightmare options that passed through Antonia Heaveringham's head when her husband Hugo uttered the words, 'I've got something to tell you,' a coming out speech never figured. Suddenly alone in their adopted home of Sydney, with no friends save for her six-year-old son Tom and a pair of jeweled Jimmy Choo mules, Antonia soon finds that an attractive single woman is not nearly so welcome on the champagne social scene as the wife of a glamorous English aristocrat.

In "Uncle from Australia", a typical fun-and-games short story, Ellery interprets the dying message of an uncle from down under and must determine which of his greedy relatives skewered him for an inheritance.

On the way to Isle of Palms, a barrier island off the South Carolina coast, forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan receives a call from the Charleston coroner. During the storm, a medical waste container has washed up on the beach. Inside are two decomposed bodies wrapped in plastic sheeting and bound with electrical wire. Chillingly, Tempe recognizes many details as identical to those of an unsolved case she handled in Quebec 15 years earlier.

After being double-crossed by a devious colleague, career woman Ellie Conlan quits her job on principle. With no idea what to do next, she retreats to Storm Harbour, an idyllic Victorian beach town. Ellie's grandfather runs The Storm Harbour Chronicle, the trusted local newspaper. As Ellie is drawn into a story about a development which could split the coastal community - and involves her with the influential O'Neill family - an event she has long suppressed threatens to overwhelm her.

Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies with Sidney Noir. This collection comprises of all new stories set in Sidney, Australia, by 14 authors of crime fiction....