AustLit

'Grace is a thief: a good one. She was taught by experts and she’s been practising since she was a kid. She specialises in small, high-value items—stamps, watches—and she knows her Jaeger-LeCoultres from her Patek Philippes. But it’s a solitary life, always watchful, always moving. It’s not the life she wants.

'Lying low after a run-in with an old associate, Grace walks into Erin Mandel’s rural antiques shop and sees a chance for something different. A normal job. A place to call home.

'But someone is looking for Erin. And someone’s looking for Grace, too.

'And they are both, in their own ways, very dangerous men.' (Publication summary)

'Hirsch’s rural beat is wide. Daybreak to day’s end, dirt roads and dust. Every problem that besets small towns and isolated properties, from unlicensed driving to arson. In the time of the virus, Hirsch is seeing stresses heightened and social divisions cracking wide open. His own tolerance under strain; people getting close to the edge.

'Today he’s driving an international visitor around: Janne Van Sant, whose backpacker son went missing while the borders were closed. They’re checking out his last photo site, his last employer. A feeling that the stories don’t quite add up.

'Then a call comes in: a roadside fire. Nothing much—a suitcase soaked in diesel and set alight—but two noteworthy facts emerge. Janne knows more than Hirsch about forensic evidence. And the body in the suitcase is not her son’s.' (Publication summary)

'A stunning new standalone crime novel from one of Australia's most revered writers

'Set in a beach-shack town an hour from Melbourne, The Way It Is Now tells the story of a burnt-out cop named Charlie Deravin.

'Charlie is living in his family's holiday house, on forced leave since he made a mess of things at work.

'Things have never been easy for Charlie. Twenty years earlier his mother went missing in the area, believed murdered. His father has always been the main suspect, though her body was never found.

'Until now- the foundations are being dug for a new house on a vacant block. The skeletal remains of a child and an adult are found-and Charlie's past comes crashing in on him.

'The Way It Is Now is the enthralling new novel by Garry Disher, one of Australia's most loved and celebrated crime writers.'(Publication summary)

'Winter in Tiverton.

'Constable Paul Hirschhausen has a snowdropper on his patch. Someone is stealing women’s underwear, and Hirsch knows enough about that kind of crime—how it can escalate—not to take it lightly.

'But the more immediate concern is a high school teacher worried about one of the students.

'A little girl in danger. A family on the edge. An absent father who isn’t where he’s supposed to be.

'The cold, seeping feeling something is very, very wrong.' (Publication summary)

'Why has Australian ‘rural noir’ become so popular? Crime novelist Garry Disher investigates'

'Every now and then I encounter people who can’t suspend disbelief. They ask how I can write about ‘such terrible things’' (Introduction)

'CONSTABLE Paul Hirschhausen runs a one-man police station in the dry farming country south of the Flinders Ranges. He’s still new in town but the community work—welfare checks and working bees—is starting to pay off. Now Christmas is here and, apart from a grass fire, two boys stealing a ute and Brenda Flann entering the front bar of the pub without exiting her car, Hirsch’s life has been peaceful.

'Until he’s called to a strange, vicious incident in Kitchener Street. And Sydney police ask him to look in on a family living on a forgotten back road outside town.

'Suddenly, it doesn’t look like a season of goodwill at all.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Wyatt regarded Robb with cold interest. It was often like this, the layers of self-regard and caution peeling away from a holdup victim, the true man or woman peeking out. He slipped back into the slumbering streets, which began to stir as the guy’s alarm reached their ears. He’d barely thought about Robb while he’d been robbing him. Now his detachment was complete.

'SOME people just work better alone. Wyatt’s one of them. He’s been getting by on nice quiet little burglaries— one-man jobs—when he gets wind of something bigger.

'A corporate crook, notorious Ponzi schemer, set to face court and certain jail time. He’s about to skip bail the old-fashioned way, on a luxury yacht with a million dollars in cash.

'To Wyatt it sounds like something he should get into.

'He’s not alone.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The young detectives call Alan Auhl a retread, but that doesn’t faze him. He does things his own way—and gets results.

'He still lives with his ex-wife, off and on, in a big house full of random boarders and hard-luck stories. And he’s still a cop, even though he retired from Homicide some years ago.

'He works cold cases now. Like the death of John Elphick—his daughters still convinced he was murdered, the coroner not so sure. Or the skeleton that’s just been found under a concrete slab. Or the doctor who killed two wives and a girlfriend, and left no evidence at all.

'Auhl will stick with these cases until justice is done. One way or another.' (Publication summary)

'Beautifully and powerfully written, this is a look at the darker side of Australia's past - and particularly the status of girls and women in our society - that will stay with you long after you finish reading.

'Out in that country the sun smeared the sky and nothing ever altered, except that one day a scrap man came by . . .

'HER name is scarcely known or remembered. All in all, she is worth less than the nine shillings and sixpence counted into her father's hand.

'She bides her time. She does her work.

'Way back in the corner of her mind is a thought she is almost too frightened to shine a light on: one day she will run away.

'A dark and unsettling tale from the turn of the twentieth century by a master of Australian literature.' (Publication summary)

'A small bushfire, but nasty enough for ice cooks to abandon their lab. Fatal, too. But when the bodies in the burnt-out Mercedes prove to be a pair of Sydney hitmen, Inspector Hal Challis's inquiries into a local ice epidemic take a darker turn. Meanwhile, Ellen Destry, head of the new sex crimes unit, finds herself not only juggling the personalities of her team but hunting a serial rapist who leaves no evidence behind. The seventh instalment in Garry Disher's celebrated Peninsula Crimes series sets up new challenges, both professional and personal, for Challis and Destry. And Disher delivers with all the suspense and human complexity for which readers love him.' (Publication summary)

'WYATT needs a job. A bank job would be nice, or a security van hold-up. As long as he doesn’t have to work with cocky idiots and strung-out meth-heads like the Pepper brothers. That’s the sort of miscalculation that buys you the wrong kind of time. So he contacts a man who in the past put him on to the right kind of heist. And finds himself in Noosa, stealing a painting for Hannah Sten. He knows how it’s done: case the premises, set up escape routes and failsafes, get in and get out with the goods unrecognised. Make a good plan; back it up with another. And be very, very careful. But who is his client? Who else wants that painting? Sometimes, being very careful is not enough.' (Publication summary)

'When Hirsch heads up Bitter Wash Road to investigate the gunfire he finds himself cut off without back-up. A pair of thrill killers has been targeting isolated farmhouses on lonely backroads, but Hirsch’s first thought is that ‘back-up’ is nearby—and about to put a bullet in him.

'That’s because Hirsch is a whistleblower. Formerly a promising metropolitan officer, now demoted and exiled to a one-cop station in South Australia’s wheatbelt. Called a dog by his brother officers. Threats; pistol cartridge in the mailbox.

'But the shots on Bitter Wash Road don’t tally with Hirsch’s assumptions. The truth turns out to be a lot more mundane. And the events that unfold subsequently, a hell of a lot more sinister.' (Publisher's blurb)