Australian Mystery

At a busy festival site on a warm spring night, a baby lies alone in her pram, her mother vanishing into the crowds. A year on, Kim Gillespie's absence casts a long shadow as her friends and loved ones gather deep in the heart of South Australian wine country to welcome a new addition to the family.

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.

In April 2006, fifteen-year-old Oliver went hiking to the lookout on Burning Mountain - and vanished without trace.

In D.M. Sorlie’s captivating story, My Friend Amelia, readers are taken on an exhilarating search for the legendary Amelia Earhart in the vast expanse of the Pacific. Dr. Jane, accompanied by her friend Sue Lee, embarks on a thrilling journey that takes them from the Bahamas to Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and finally to Hawaii for a climactic and exciting conclusion. Set in the year 1951, after the end of World War II, the story follows Dr. Jane and Sue Lee as they join forces to uncover the truth about Dr. Jane’s childhood idol, Amelia Earhart, an American aviation pioneer who ...

GRIPPING DARK AUSTRALIAN STORY In the distance a man watches her Perfect she stands on the beach Wavelets lapping at her feet He desires her, he will charm her She will come with him like others Where are those others now? She goes with him, travelling to distant places They walk all alone in a land of bright sunlight She sees not the shadows hiding in the dark Awful secrets emerge - she knows she must escape. But she is trapped with him in the middle of nowhere. Her hands and feet are tied. She is a captive. He is taking her to a place of huge crocodiles. She fears she will vanish inside ...

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.

One lonely night, a cabbie discovers that his intoxicated passenger has been suffocated with a handkerchief saturated in chloroform. The murderer, the victim, and the motive are all unknown. Fergus Hume's first literary attempt, became the best-selling mystery novel of the 19th century.

For months during 1943 there was no night in Hellfire Pass. By the light of flares, carbide lamps and bamboo fires, men near-naked and skeletal cut a passage through stone to make way for a railway. Among these men were some of the 22,000 Australian soldiers taken prisoner by the Japanese during World War II. In camps across Asia and the Pacific, they struggled, died, and survived with a little help from their mates.

In the neon-drenched alleys of Budapest, Will Slater comes face to face with his past. Jason King is back–and he brings devastating news. When Slater agrees to help King get revenge, they quickly find themselves in a fight they know very little about. Because the world is changing and technology is rapidly advancing, spiralling toward a total transformation of society. There is a new breed of terrorist–the next step in human evolution. As the truth unravels, the terror amplifies. And by the time it's over, they both find out that there is a fate far, far worse than death.

Andrea Oliver's mother, Laura, is the perfect small-town mum. Laura lives a quiet but happy life in sleepy beachside Belle Isle. She's a pillar of the community: a speech therapist, business owner, and everybody's friend. And she's never kept a secret from anyone. Or so Andrea thinks. When Andrea is caught in a random violent attack at a shopping mall, Laura intervenes and acts in a way that is unrecognizable to her daughter. It"s like Laura is a completely different person—and that's because she was. Thirty years ago. Before Andrea. Before Belle Isle.

Half a year ago in Macau, Will Slater waged war to rescue nine-year-old Shien from the clutches of a hellish industry. He left her with an old government colleague, who promised to find her a foster home and give her some semblance of a normal upbringing. Slater moved on... Now, deep in cartel-infested Colombia, he hears dark whispers of something called the Lynx program–a clandestine division that raises young girls and forges them into sociopathic killers. A division founded by the very same man Slater left Shien with.

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.

In the twilight of his career, Logan learns he has been a vessel for furthering government interests, not a rogue hitman for a band of vigilantes. The revelation destroys him. But when Jorge Romero—an investigative reporter and Logan's oldest friend—is brutally and inexplicably murdered, Logan allows his fury to deliver him from despair. With an ally in Alice Mason, a homeless witness with a target on her back, Logan goes to war. Against whom, he isn't sure, but he knows powerful forces are at work behind the scenes.

The impeccably dressed Miss Kate Cocks might look more like a schoolmistress than a policewoman, but don't let that fool you. She's a household name, wrangling wayward husbands, seeing through deceptive clairvoyants, and rescuing young women (whether they like it or not) with the help of a five-foot cane and her sassy junior constable, Ethel Bromley. When shop assistant Dora Black is found dead on a city beach, Miss Cocks and Ethel are ordered to stay out of the investigation and leave it to the men. But when Dora's workmate goes missing soon after, the women suspect something sinister.

Will Slater needs to lay low. With the whole U.S. government antagonised by his recent actions, he smuggles himself to rural eastern Zimbabwe and tries to keep his head down. But that was never going to happen. Whispers and rumours of a gang of psychopaths sweep across the plains. Remnants of the old regime, cast out from the previous dictatorship, continue to wreak havoc. They’re armed to the teeth and their manic leader is untouchable. They own this territory, and everyone in it.

Tessa is a thoroughbred. A brilliant young barrister. She has worked her way up from a working-class background to be at the top of her game: defending, cross-examining and lighting up the shadows of doubt in any case. Her masterful line of questioning in the courtroom has netted Tessa win after win, freeing men accused of rape and sexual assault. As controversial as it is, this is her job - it's just about the facts and who can game the system. Working late one night, Tessa falls into a casual relationship with Julian, a coworker, an attorney who comes from an elite, wealthy family.

When Detective Constable Lillian Tate arrives at a remote paleontological research site in the harsh Nullarbor Plain, she expects a routine missing person case. Dr. Noah Henshaw, a respected scientist studying ancient fossils, has vanished into the red dust of the Australian desert. What begins as a straightforward welfare check quickly transforms into something more sinister. The discovery of Dr. Henshaw's body reveals a brutal murder that shatters the quiet academic world of fossil research and threatens to expose secrets that powerful people will kill to protect. As Tate delves deeper ...

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 ...

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.

Tikka Malloy was 11 and one-sixth years old during the long hot summer of 1992, living in an Australian suburb with her sister and their three best friends. That summer was when the Van Apfel sisters, Ruth, Hannah, and the beautiful Cordelia, mysteriously disappeared. Did they just run - far away from their harsh, evangelical parents - or were they taken? While the search for the girls united the small community, the mystery of their disappearance was never solved. Now, years later, Tikka has returned home to try to make sense of that strange moment in time.