Australian Mystery

If Hallmark Mysteries joined the Travel Channel describes the Challenge Series. Dave and Katie Parker are a retirement aged couple recovering from difficult circumstances. “I feel like our old life was a boat that went over a waterfall with us inside. Now we’re bobbing up in the pool below, glad to be alive, but without a boat,” says Katie. The Challenge Series of novels follow the Parkers as they solve mysteries, thwart criminals, and find new adventures in colorful locales. Challenge Down Under Dave and Katie Parker’s only son, Jeremy, is getting married in Australia. In spite of ...

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.

Reid left the small town of Manson a decade ago, promising his former Chief of Police boss he'd never return. He made a new life in the city, became a PI and turned his back on his old life for good. Now an insurance firm has offered him good money to look into a suspicious car crash, and he finds himself back in the place he grew up—home to his complicated family history, a scarring relationship breakdown and a very public career-ending incident. As Reid's investigation unfolds, nothing is as it seems.

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 2005, and Jed Walker has just joined the CIA. As a 10-year veteran of Air Force Special Operations, Walker is used to being at the pointy end of things. But normally the front line is much further from home. Sent to New Orleans on the trail of Russians wanting to claim back what was stolen from them in Afghanistan, it doesn't take long for Walker to realise that in the murky world of espionage, the rules of war do not apply.

When girl Detective Friday Barnes solves a bank robbery she uses the reward money to send herself to the most exclusive boarding school in the country, Highcrest Academy. On arrival, Friday is shocked to discover the respectable school is actually a hotbed of crime. She's soon investigating everything from disappearing homework to the Yeti running around the school swamp. That’s when she’s not dealing with her own problem - Ian Wainscott, the handsomest boy in school, who inexplicably hates Friday and loves nasty pranks.

Three years into his tumultuous career as a black-ops wrecking ball, a young Jason King’s superiors mandate a week’s rest between assignments. But three days in, his vacation is nixed, and a mysterious CIA spook puts him on a plane to Chile for a training camp atop the highest volcano on earth. Ojos del Salado sits twenty thousand feet above sea level–within hours of arrival, the workload threatens to destroy him: physically, emotionally, spiritually. But there’s a reason they want him crippled by altitude sickness.

Detective Sergeant Mark Ariti has taken a few days' holiday in Broken Bay at precisely the wrong time. The small fishing town on South Australia's Limestone Coast is now the scene of a terrible tragedy. Renowned cave-diver Mya Rennik has drowned while exploring a sinkhole on the land of wealthy farmer Frank Doyle. As the press descends, Mark's boss orders him to stay put and assist the police operation. But when they retrieve Mya's body, a whole new mystery is opened up, around the disappearance of a young local woman twenty years before.

When a mysterious client hires Penn Gwinn, a private investigator based in San Rafael, California, to locate the legendary opal called the Aqualene, Penn thought it would be a quick buck. He had no idea he was about to become involved in a bizarre chase for the Aqualene, called the Eye of God, part of the Australian Aborigine heritage. As this case takes him through Mexico and on to Australia, he attracts many so-called friends and allies. The confrontation with the Quad Lateral Council, an international criminal syndicate, leaves a trail of bodies. Penn deals with phony detectives and ...

In Darwin, Australia in the Northwest Territories, crocodiles aren't the only predators lurking about. Inspector Harry Chin, and his partner, Ash Friday, a fierce Aboriginal detective with dark brooding eyes, are sent from Canberra to investigate the murder of an Australian Federal Police Officer, Peter Riggs. Riggs had been working undercover on an international heroin ring that seems to be coming in through the Port of Darwin. The officer had been found in his car dead from an overdose of heroin--the very drug that he had been investigating. Everything seems to be pointing to a heroin ...

Friday's Mum, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, has been accused of espionage. The police think she's been selling secrets about the CERN Hadron Super Collider. Friday knows her mother isn't capable of such a thing - this is a woman who can't even operate a dishwasher. She's got to smuggle herself into Switzerland to clear her Mum's name. Fortunately, Melanie is a master of disguise. After an extremely extreme make-over, Friday arrives at CERN and finds axolotls in the water coolers, graffiti in the great hall and most baffling of all - her sister has fallen in love with an engineer!

From the outside, the Delaneys appear to be an enviably contented family. Even after all these years, former tennis coaches Joy and Stan are still winning tournaments, and now that they've sold the family business, they have all the time in the world to learn how to 'relax'. Their four adult children are busy living their own lives, and while it could be argued they never quite achieved their destinies, no one ever says that out loud.

In the small, sleepy town of Gattan, population 7448, it happened at eleven o'clock on a Saturday morning. At the local soccer field, only one boy, aged ten years and one week, remained standing as the brothers, sisters and parents of his teammates realised the horror they were witnessing.

Sydney, 1946. Though war correspondent Billie Walker is happy to finally be home, for her the heady postwar days are tarnished by the loss of her father and the disappearance in Europe of her husband, Jack. To make matters worse, now that the war is over, the newspapers are sidelining her reporting talents to prioritize jobs for returning soldiers. But Billie is a survivor and she's determined to take control of her own future. So, she reopens her late father's business, a private investigation agency, and, slowly, the women of Sydney come knocking.

Who knew boarding school could be this perilous!

Patterson's greatest crime-solving team since the Women's Murder Club is the Bird Sisters. Rhonda and Barbara "Baby" Bird are half-sisters-and full partners in their Los Angeles detective agency. They agree on nothing.

Police corruption, an investigation that ends in tragedy and the mystery of a little girl's silence - three unconnected events that will prove to be linked by one small town. While Detective Cormac Reilly faces enemies at work and trouble in his personal life, Garda Peter Fisher is relocated out of Galway with the threat of prosecution hanging over his head. But even that is not as terrible as having to work for his overbearing father, the local copper for the pretty seaside town of Roundstone.

Chrissy, a journalism lecturer struggling to re-enter the workforce after maternity leave, stumbles upon a decades-old mystery that could be her ticket back into the career she loves. A photograph of four young women in ski wear, taken in the Snowy Mountains in 1980, leads her to a chilling double-murder case that was never solved. Michael and Gloria Katzenbach vanished during a white-out, their bodies uncovered months later when the ice melted. The case went cold, but Chrissy is determined to find the truth.

'In 1954, at just fourteen years of age, Mabel Waller became the youngest Australian in history to be convicted of murder.' In 2025, on a quiet Melbourne lane, an elderly man is found dead by his neighbour, 81-year-old Elsie Fitzpatrick. No one suspects any foul play. Until they discover Elsie's past. In the 1950s, her name was not Elsie. It was Mabel. 'She is known around the world as Mad Mabel. But is she mad? More importantly, is she guilty?' When the police open a new investigation and the media descend upon her, the elderly Mabel decides it's time to set the record straight.

I was dreading the Cunningham family reunion even before the first murder. Before the storm stranded us at the mountain resort, snow and bodies piling up. The thing is, us Cunninghams don't really get along. We've only got one thing in common: we've all killed someone.