AustLit

'An anti-Vietnam War demonstration by angry Australian college students in the sixties results in the death of a young woman marcher. No one seems to know how she came to be struck down. But as the police seek to charge one of the leaders of the protest, Jefferson Shields, a private detective, eliminates the most likely suspects and, a la G. K. Chesterton, identifies the only possible culprit.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Soho Press).

'An early-morning murder in the park of a quiet country town. Two hitch-hiking girls, one of them guilty - one of them a liar.

'Four years on, Marion still has to know who killed her brother. The police, the press and ordinary people have lost interest in the case. She needs to call on Jefferson Shields - she's been told that he solves puzzles.

'You'll be baffled to the end of The Souvenir.' (Publisher's blurb [Wakefield Press ed.])

'A ten minute joyride turns into manslaughter as two teenagers hit-and-run. This then meticulously traces the aftermath as Julius and Barry try to find the old woman whose dog they also killed, who may or may not have seen them. And finally it leads to murder as Barry becomes obsessed with the need to destroy all evidence. As taut as the youngsters' nerves and an indictment of the too typical community whose see-nothing-say-nothing attitude precipitates further disasters.'

Source: Kirkus Reviews.

'Nine-year-old Ann has been taken to a nature reserve by her Aunt Rachel. As they are leaving, she sees a strange young man staring at them. After his panic subsides, the young man, Mart, realizes that they may be able to connect him to the girl he's just strangled. Hence a game of cat and mouse begins as Mart stalks them and other inhabitants of their small Australian town. Will Ann and her aunt escape?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A child has been kidnapped. His father, Evan Kiley, a reporter on the local newspaper in this small Australian city, telephones the home of the Wintons. They are a well-to-do family whose small daughter had been abducted - and returned - a year or so earlier. The Wintons had paid the ransom demanded without calling in the police. Because he cooperated with the criminals, Kiley accuses Winton of complicity in their crime. The men who took Robin Kiley, just a toddler, followed the same pattern as that of the earlier kidnapping of Winton's little girl. Had Winton notified the authorities, the criminals would have been caught and Robin would have been spared, Kiley says. Winton feels guilty and sorry for Kiley so he agrees to help him in his time of need. Gradually, the two men are drawn together in a plot to thwart the kidnappers and to get Robin Kiley back. But something goes wrong and a murder is committed.' (Source: Trove)

'The contentious relatives living on the remote Forst sheep station are united against an interloper from Sydney who was hired to nurse old Mrs. Forst in her last illness. Now the heir, Gregory Forst, has become engaged to marry her and the others fear that they will be turned out of the valley. A bushfire rages, threatening all of their homesteads. And then, the charred body of a swagman is found. How did he die? Could he have been murdered? By the outsider, the nurse? Who, really, is Linda Condrick?'

Source: Publisher's blurb (late reprint).

Newly blind, Ruth Latimer is sent to Havenrest, a coastal resting house for the blind, by her doctor, Gavin Ferrer. Here, she stumbles across the body of a man washed up on the seashore.