AustLit

'Remote Australia, 1916. Stella Winterson wants nothing more than to be with Jasper Reynolds but she is thwarted at every turn by her father’s tyrannical rule. When her father banishes her to an isolated guest house without Jasper knowing, the young man recklessly enlists to fight in the Great War, Stella devastated when she hears of it. ' (Publication summary)
 

On a wet winter’s night in 1967, Harry and Dianne Colston are killed when their car collides with a freight train near the town of Mitchell. But from the outset Senior Sergeant Lloyd Cole suspects it might be more than just a tragic accident.

Source: Author's Blurb

When a teenage girl and boy go missing from Mitchell everyone has a theory about what happened to them. Most in town think they’re runaways. Others suspect their families or marijuana growers as rumours and gossip abound in the orchards and farms of Victoria’s northern plains. But when the brutally murdered teenagers’ bodies are discovered in an isolated paddock a fortnight later, the town’s attention quickly turns to its itinerant, summertime population and to the dead girl’s boyfriend, Lee Furnell.

Source: Author's Blurb

'Huge floodwaters have engulfed a remote Victorian goldfield, reducing the prospect of digging up a fortune from very slim to impossible, and adding disease to the many possibilities of sudden death in harsh conditions. As sickness starts to take its toll and calls mount for the rescue of diggers stranded by the raging torrent, Sergeant Niall Kennedy must try to keep order in a place where frictions can become murderous. Does a suspiciously abandoned tent suggest there has already been a killing? And why has Mosquito Creek's erratic Commissioner Stanfield drafted in special troopers behind Kennedy's back?

'In a new country where everyone's past has a question mark, asking too many questions is dangerous. But how else can you get to the truth?

'Mosquito Creek is a rare treat - historical fiction that brilliantly evokes the hardships of early Australia, and a crime novel in a setting where crime touches upon everyone and everything. A priceless relic from the Old Country deepens the mystery and adds a mythic quality to the events unfolding in this isolated settlement. An Australian Deadwood.' (From the publisher's website.)