2018 Reading Reminiscences

It’s 1890. Holmes’s fame has spread even to the colonies, and he and his stalwart chronicler Watson are swept up in an array of mysteries Down Under. They find themselves summoned from place to place, dealing with exciting and unique mysteries in every corner of this strange island continent.

Contributors include Kerry Greenwood, Meg Keneally, Lucy Sussex, Kaaron Warren, L.J.M. Owen and many more.

Editor Christopher Sequeira is known and respected internationally for his Holmes-related writings. His published work includes poetry, prose, and comic-book scripts, including Pulse of Darkness, Rattlebone: The Pulp-Faced Detective and The Borderlander. 

What happens when a drug dealer is forced to turn detective?
Meet Bill Murdoch, the world's most reluctant private investigator.

Bill Murdoch’s doing just fine, thanks for not asking. He’s dealing drugs for a professional crime syndicate in Sydney and saving for a house by the sea. But what does he think life is - a fairy tale?

As the syndicate puts pressure on him to fill the shoes of his murdered boss, Murdoch is cornered by an equally formidable foe: the Australian Tax Office demanding an explanation for his sizeable cash income.

Murdoch spins a beautiful lie, telling tax inspector, Hannah Simms, he’s a private detective. When Simms asks him to investigate the mystery of her niece's disappearance, Murdoch grabs what he thinks is a golden opportunity to outrun the syndicate. But his arrival in the missing girl's small coastal home town causes an unexpected stir and the reluctant PI soon realises his troubles are only just beginning.

HEADLAND is noir crime at its best, a thriller to keep you guessing until the very end.

HEADLAND is the first book in the Bill Murdoch Mystery series. It is perfect for fans of Alan Furst, Peter Temple, Adrian McKinty, and anyone who enjoys Kate Atkinson’s ‘Jackson Brodie’ series.

Bad-boy-turned-local-hero, Bill Murdoch, will return for more hardboiled noir adventures in the sequels CLASS ACT, and BASE NATURE. 

For Detective Matt Buchanan, the world is a pretty sick place. He has probably been in the job too long, for one thing. And then there’s 14-year-old Samantha Coates, and the other unsolved murder cases. Those innocent girls he just can’t get out of his head. When Buchanan pursues some fresh leads, it soon becomes clear he’s on the trail of something big. As he pieces the horrific crimes together, Buchanan finds the very foundations of everything he once believed in start to crumble. He’s forced across that grey line that separates right and wrong – into places so dark, even he might not make it back. 

"In the silence she could hear the oncoming hum, like a large flock approaching. She didn’t want to hear his story; she’d had enough of them."

Tess is on the run when she’s picked up from the side of the road by lonely middle-aged father Lewis Rose. With reluctance, she’s drawn into his family troubles and comes to know a life she never had. 

Set in Masterton at the turn of the millennium, Tess is a gothic love story about the ties that bind and tear a family apart.

When former police detective Ted Conkaffey was wrongly accused of abducting thirteen-year-old Claire Bingley, he hoped the Queensland rainforest town of Crimson Lake would be a good place to disappear. But nowhere is safe from Claire’s devastated father.

Dale Bingley has a brutal revenge plan all worked out – and if Ted doesn’t help find the real abductor, he’ll be its first casualty.

Meanwhile, in a dark roadside hovel called the Barking Frog Inn, the bodies of two young bartenders lie on the beer-sodden floor. It’s Detective Inspector Pip Sweeney’s first homicide investigation – complicated by the arrival of private detective Amanda Pharrell to ‘assist’ on the case. Amanda’s conviction for murder a decade ago has left her with some odd behavioural traits, top-to-toe tatts – and a keen eye for killers.

For Ted and Amanda, the hunt for the truth will draw them into a violent dance with evil. Redemption is certainly on the cards – but it may well cost them their lives . . .

When Craig Walters discovers his widowed-Mother is dying, he puts his dreams on hold and accepts a position at a small private bank in his hometown of Melbourne, Australia.  For Craig, the steady income offers a chance to regroup.  However, his indoctrination into the banking world quickly deteriorates when believing he’s stumbled upon an elaborate fraud scheme.  His covert digging into the bank’s files for confirmation promptly sets off alarm bells that reverberate around the globe and unwittingly lays bare a more in-depth, sinister plot.

Linking Melbourne with modern-day Irish politics, and the unlimited power and reach of the Vatican; an intricate web of corruption and unbridled greed is spun that entwines all that come in contact.

And whether to Turn a Blind Eye becomes a matter of life and death.

Ten years after surviving special operations in Afghanistan, Danny Clay is working as a scriptwriter in the emotional war zone of TV production. His best mate and editor is Vietnamese neighbour Zan who may or may not have killed a man with her bare hands. When their writer friends start dying in mysterious circumstances, Danny must resurrect his old army sapper skills to prevent himself and Zan becoming the next victims.

From the backstreets and brothels of Sydney's Kings Cross to the fake sincerity of Hollywood, Perfect Criminals is an action-packed and hilarious romp through the dark side of the entertainment criminals have the same skill set as movie producers - only with a more evolved moral code. 

Career criminal John Killick was involved in the most audacious prison break in Australian history when he escaped from Sydney’s Silverwater prison after his partner in crime Lucy Dudko commandeered a scenic helicopter flight at gunpoint.

Australia’s ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ spent 45 days on the run before being caught… Killick was sentenced to 23 years jail; Dudko to ten. After his release, the pair meet up again but are they the same people? Is the magic still there?

This is John Killick’s story – raw, confronting and redemptive.

This is his story of self-discovery, of a wasted life of years in prison, and one which he hopes will stop other young offenders from making similar mistakes.

It's been twenty years since Cormac Reilly discovered the body of Hilaria Blake in her crumbling Georgian home. But he's never forgotten the two children she left behind...

When Aisling Conroy's boyfriend Jack is found in the freezing black waters of the river Corrib, the police tell her it was suicide. A surgical resident, she throws herself into study and work, trying to forget - until Jack's sister Maude shows up. Maude suspects foul play, and she is determined to prove it.

DI Cormac Reilly is the detective assigned with the re-investigation of an 'accidental' overdose twenty years ago - of Jack and Maude's drug- and alcohol-addled mother. Cormac is under increasing pressure to charge Maude for murder when his colleague Danny uncovers a piece of evidence that will change everything...

A rural-crime novel about finding out how to survive and surviving what you find.

In a small country town, an act of revenge causes five lives to collide. Early one Christmas morning, Graeme Sweetapple, a man down on his luck, is heading home with a truck full of stolen steers when he comes across an upended ute that has hit a tree. He is about to get involved with Luke, an environmental protestor who isn’t what he seems; a washed-up local politician, Caroline Statham, who is searching for a sense of purpose, but whose businessman husband seems to be sliding into corruption; and Carson, who is wild, bound to no one, and determined to escape her circumstances.

Into their midst comes Retribution, a legendary horse worth a fortune. Her disappearance triggers a cycle of violence and retaliation that threatens the whole community. As tensions build, they must answer one question: is true retribution ever possible — or even desirable?

'He said that they’d let me go on purpose. That they could easily find me if they wanted to. He said that they didn’t want me. That I was too much trouble. He said if I went to the cops, he’d know. If I told Sonya, he’d know. If I talked to friends or teachers, he’d know. He told me to pretend it didn’t happen. He told me to consider it a compliment, that I was too strong. His last words to me were, ‘Just forget’. 

Troubled teen Faith Marsden was one of several girls abducted from Crawton, a country town known for its picturesque lake and fertile farmland. Unlike the others, she escaped, though sixteen years on she still bears the emotional and physical scars. 

Zoe Haywood returns to Crawton to bury her estranged mother Lillian, who has taken her own life. As she and Faith rekindle their high-school friendship, they discover notes left by Lillian that point to two more young women who recently disappeared from Crawton. But Lillian’s confused ramblings leave them with more questions than answers. 

As Faith and Zoe delve deeper into the mystery, they become intent on saving the missing women, but in doing so are drawn into Auckland’s hidden world of drugs, abduction and murder. And then Faith decides to confront the mastermind – on her own. 

Detective Sergeant Philip ‘Cato’ Kwong is light on sleep but high on happiness with his new wife Sharon Wang and their baby girl. But contentment is not compatible with life in the Job, and soon a series of murders of Fremantle’s homeless people gets in the way of Cato’s newfound bliss. As New Wave journalist Norman Lip flirts online with the killer, it becomes apparent that these murders are personal — every death is bringing the killer one step closer to Cato. 

How could police lose three children? Three missing children. A wild storm. A long way from home. Melbourne journalist Georgie Harvey is on hand when three children disappear from a police-run camp in the Dandenong Ranges. When Daylesford cop John Franklin hears the news, he is on secondment 200 kilometres away. Feeling responsible for the local kids, he abandons his post to join the search. Somebody saw the children. Somebody knows something. Every minute is vital. Frustration and desperation mount as the polar storm intensifies. Pushed to the outer by local detectives, Franklin and Georgie find cyber links to a serial predator and another missing girl, and will risk everything in their race to avert tragedy.

My Name Is Revenge is in two parts. There is a novella, and an essay reflecting on the historic events that inspired that novella, and meditating also on how history can inform fiction. In the essay the writer says she hopes everything she writes will ‘arouse curiosity’. Both the novella and the essay do just that, and also much, much more. Both pieces are informed by a passion to express the haunting of almost unimaginable historical crimes, and the tragic shapes that vengeance for those crimes can take.

“The novella is a powerful exploration of the long-term, far-flung effects of the horrors of the genocide of the Armenian people by the Ottoman government during World War One. The narrative is set in Sydney in 1980, and it dramatizes the assassination of the Turkish Consul by the grandsons of a victim of the 1914 genocide. The author’s grandfather saw ‘his entire family killed while he hid in the upper branches of a tree’.

“The essay is a compelling account of how the author, great-grand-child of victims of the genocide, has worked with the bitter historical events which began on the day before the landing of the Australian troops at Gallipoli. This planned co-incidence of horrors affords the whole manuscript an urgency for Australian readers in particular. To quote from the text, this is ‘an echo of terror across six decades’. And ‘revenge’ is the very meaning of the main character’s name.

A successful entrepreneur in the mushroom industry, Jaakko Kaunismaa is a man in his prime. At just 37 years of age, he is shocked when his doctor tells him that he’s dying. What is more, the cause is discovered to be prolonged exposure to toxins; in other words, someone has slowly but surely been poisoning him. Determined to find out who wants him dead, Jaakko embarks on a suspenseful rollercoaster journey full of unusual characters, bizarre situations and unexpected twists.

With a nod to Fargo and the best elements of the Scandinavian noir tradition, The Man Who Died is a page-turning thriller brimming with the blackest comedy surrounding life and death, and love and betrayal, marking a stunning new departure for the King of Helsinki Noir. 

A rookie spy. Europe on a knife edge. A distinct lack of coffee.

Eva Destruction is back in her first ever assignment. Straight out of the MI6 academy, Eva is on the trail of a supposedly dead fellow agent. It’s a nothing assignment given to a rookie, but when suicide bombers hit a NATO conference the mission is kicked into high gear. Eva chases a carnage of gunfire and explosions across Europe in search of the mysterious shadowy organization, ‘The Tempest’. 

On the scorching February day in 2009 that became known as Black Saturday, a man lit two fires in Victoria's Latrobe Valley, then sat on the roof of his house to watch the inferno. In the Valley, where the rates of crime were the highest in the state, more than thirty people were known to police as firebugs. But the detectives soon found themselves on the trail of a man they didn't know. The Arsonist takes readers on the hunt for this man, and inside the strange puzzle of his mind. It is also the story of fire in this country, and of a community that owed its existence to that very element. The command of fire has defined and sustained us as a species - understanding its abuse will define our future.  A powerful real-life thriller written with Hooper's trademark lyric detail and nuance, The Arsonist is a reminder that in an age of fire, all of us are gatekeepers. 

On a beach not far from the isolated settlement of Sydney in 1797, a fishing boat picks up three shipwreck survivors, distressed and terribly injured. They have walked hundreds of miles across a landscape whose features—and inhabitants—they have no way of comprehending. They have lost fourteen companions along the way. Their accounts of the ordeal are evasive. It is Lieutenant Joshua Grayling’s task to investigate the story. He comes to realise that those fourteen deaths were contrived by one calculating mind and, as the full horror of the men’s journey emerges, he begins to wonder whether the ruthless killer poses a danger to his own family.