Australian Detective Mysteries

Stacey and Laney are twins—mirror images of each other—and yet they’re as different as the sun and the moon. Stacey works hard at school, determined to get out of their small town. Laney skips school and sneaks out of the house to meet her boyfriend. But when Laney disappears one night, Stacey can’t believe she’s just run off without telling her. As the days pass and Laney doesn’t return, Stacey starts dreaming of her twin. The dreams are dark and terrifying, difficult to understand and hard to shake, but at least they tell Stacey one key thing—Laney is alive.

They came to heal. They never left. The Hillview Wellness Institute offers desperate people a second chance — exclusive treatments, remote luxury, and the promise of transformation. When drought exposes a body preserved in the cracked clay near the property, Detective Maya Thorne discovers that some clients got more transformation than they paid for. The dead woman wasn't the first. The excavation reveals another body beneath her. Both were guests who checked in and never checked out — their disappearances explained away, their families told they'd "moved on." Director Dr Martin Hayes ...

The plane crashed forty years ago. The body inside died yesterday. Detective Sergeant Kate Hayes — a female detective with a reputation for unearthing the truth — is called to a remote crash site near Coober Pedy. She expects wreckage and old bones. What she finds is a fresh corpse — a man in a 1980s RAAF flight suit, carrying ID for a pilot declared dead in 1984. The plane’s been buried in red dust for decades. The victim was alive until now. Someone kept him that way. As Kate digs into military records and classified files, she uncovers buried secrets tied to a Cold War programme ...

A decade of drought reveals what water once hid. A family's darkest secret surfaces with the bones. When the eastern dam on Kanyaka Station dries completely after ten years of unprecedented drought, station hand Jack Morrison discovers human remains in the mud. Detective Sergeant Kate Hayes is called to investigate what appears to be a decades-old murder in one of South Australia's most remote regions. The skeleton belongs to Tom Brennan, the youngest son of the powerful Brennan pastoral dynasty, who disappeared without a trace in March 1998. His family reported him missing, his car was ...

As Inspector Lestrade asks "why, gentlemen, would someone break into a house, murder the owner and then steal only one volume of an Australian atlas, when all three volumes were there for the taking," more atlases are stolen before Holmes solves the mystery.

Beneath the sun-drenched opulence of Cairns' French consulate, where gossip bubbles like champagne and secrets swim deeper than the Great Coral Sea, a shocking tableau unfolds. Madame Monet, the captivating Honorary Consul, lies strangled in her silk-swathed bedroom, a pair of Givenchy stockings twisted around her elegant throat. Canberra dispatches their finest: Inspectors, Harry Chin a whirlwind of Savile Row tailoring and razor-sharp deductions, and at his side stands Ash Friday, an aboriginal tracker whose eyes can pierce through the darkest shadows lurking beneath. As they navigate the...

In the scorched savanna of the Kimberley, where fire is both life-giver and destroyer, Special Investigator Odysseus "Odie" Kalaris is called to investigate when the body of climate scientist Dr. Nathan Bennett is discovered amid a controlled burn gone wrong. What begins as a suspected fire management accident evolves into something far more sinister, revealing connections between manipulated climate data and powerful corporate interests operating in the shadows of the Kimberley. When traditional fire breaks are found to have been deliberately sabotaged and irreplaceable rock art sites ...

She was sent to sign off on an accident. She uncovered an outback noir murder worth $200,000. Detective Sergeant Kate Hayes — a female detective with a reputation for cutting through lies — arrives in Andamooka expecting routine paperwork. A miner has died in a tunnel collapse, common in opal country where fortunes are clawed from unstable shafts beneath the South Australian desert. But Barry Mitchell’s death wasn’t bad luck. Someone set charges to bury him. And Kate knows why: an opal strike worth $200,000, hidden for twenty‑five years. Mitchell’s former partner and ex‑...

Is Harriet Blue as great a detective as Lindsay Boxer? Harriet Blue, the most single-minded detective since Lindsay Boxer, won't rest until she stops a savage killer targeting female university students. But new clues point to a more chilling predator than she ever could have imagined. BookShots...

When Friday's father turns up out of the blue, he brings his daughter some distressing news - Friday's mother has been kidnapped! But who would want to kidnap a theoretical physicist? The Headmaster needs Friday's help too, when Highcrest Academy is thrown into chaos by the arrival of a...

For fans of Jane Harper's THE DRY, Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad, and C.J. Box's conspiracy thrillers. Three years after exposing Protocol Seven destroyed her career, Detective Inspector Kate Hayes thought the conspiracy was buried. She was wrong. When Dr Robert Ashford is found dead in his Adelaide Hills home, the staged suicide fools everyone except Kate. Ashford was a Protocol Seven witness—one of the few who testified and survived. Or so Kate believed. The USB drive Ashford left behind reveals the devastating truth: Protocol Seven wasn't the crime. It was the cover-up. For fifteen...

Cyrus Haven and Evie Cormac return in this “expertly paced and psychologically acute” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) thriller from Michael Robotham that’s “one of his best, suspenseful and hard to put down” (Stephen King). Twenty years ago, Cyrus Haven survived a family massacre. The...

What begins as a straightforward homicide quickly evolves into something far more sinister when Detective Maya Thorne discovers evidence of Dr Lawson's medical negligence and drug addiction that led to patients' deaths. As she digs deeper, a complex web of protection and corruption emerges, involving town officials who chose maintaining healthcare over patient safety. When council member James Wilson becomes the prime suspect, Maya uncovers his desperate arrangement with Lawson—protection in exchange for experimental treatment for Wilson's chronically ill wife. With evidence mounting of a...

Over 120,000 words of Australian crime thriller brilliance. The complete Kate Hayes journey—six books, six years, one detective who refuses to let corruption win. For fans of Jane Harper, Tana French, and C.J. Box. In the unforgiving Australian outback, Detective Kate Hayes discovers a truth that will destroy her career: Protocol Seven, a government surveillance programme designed to eliminate threats and silence whistleblowers. Exposing it costs her everything. But Kate doesn't stop. This complete six-book series follows Kate's relentless pursuit of justice through: THE RED DESERT - ...

“Highly recommended—well-rounded, believable characters, a multi-layered plot solidly based on human nature, all authentically set in the England of 1917…an outstanding and riveting read.” —New York Times bestselling author Stephanie Laurens “Bess Crawford is a strong and likable...

The death of Old Joe, a homeless man on Darlinghurst Road, seemed inevitable—until the autopsy revealed it was murder. Darlinghurst Road, once the beating heart of Sydney's red-light district, is where the past lingers in the shadows. However, the city's Eastern Suburbs are not known for bloodshed. When a second victim, an affluent woman from exclusive Point Piper, is found with her throat cut, the divide between Sydney's elite and its outcasts grows more sinister. Detective Gary Haddock has seen it all in Homicide, but even he is baffled by the lack of connection between the murders. ...

Wool is currency. Silence is tradition. And a man lies dead with his own blades in his chest. In a Warragulla shearing shed, a body is found splayed across the board — a wool classer who knew too much about how fleeces get graded and whose pockets they fill. Detective Maya Thorne arrives expecting a rural homicide. What she finds is an industry rotten to the core. Fraudulent classifications. Rigged auctions. Land siphoned from desperate farmers into the hands of two people who've controlled the district's wool trade for decades: Sarah Kingsley, a landowner with a legacy to protect, and ...

In drought-stricken Warragulla, where parched paddocks and cracked earth mirror the town's hidden fractures, Detective Maya Thorne investigates the poisoning of beloved publican Albert Whitcombe. What begins as an isolated murder quickly reveals deeper currents when Maya discovers Whitcombe planned to publish a memoir exposing the town's darkest secrets. When evidence connects the murder to a fifteen-year-old hit-and-run that killed a teenage boy, Maya must navigate small-town silence and the powerful influence of the Langley family, who've shaped Warragulla's narrative for generations. As ...

He calls it education. Kate Hayes calls it murder. Detective Kate Hayes has spent eighteen months rebuilding her career after the Protocol Seven scandal. Now, leading her first major task force, she faces a killer who poses his victims like art—strangled, positioned facing east, left in South Australia's remote salt lakes to mummify in the harsh desert air. All solo female travellers. All independent women who refused to be afraid. All murdered by a man who believes he's teaching them—and society—a necessary lesson about the dangers of freedom. When the killer contacts Kate directly, ...

Perfect for fans of Jane Harper, Chris Hammer, and Garry Disher In the shadow of Queensland's Glasshouse Mountains, Detective Jack Mercer discovers a body hidden for seven years. The victim: Dr. Marcus Webb, a disgraced astronomer who disappeared after making claims about classified satellite activity above Australian territory. Webb's death was ruled a hiking accident. But Mercer finds evidence the body was moved—and someone has been maintaining the cover-up for nearly a decade. When investigative journalist Sarah Chen dies in a car crash hours before meeting Mercer with "proof of ...