Cirrus@Austlit

'A cryptic and mysterious case history appears in the autobiography of pioneering Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung: 'A lady came to my office. She refused to give her name ... What she had to communicate to me was a confession. Some twenty years ago, she had committed a murder ...'

'Jung's encounter with the woman had an explosive effect on him, and brought him very close to total breakdown. Morris West recreates this episode in a gripping blend of truth and dramatic speculation.

'Set in pre-World War I Europe, The World is Made of Glass is a powerful novel of love, sexual obsession, murder and guilt It has been called Morris West's finest creation of the imagination.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Allen & Unwin, 2017).

'Harry Tremayne, a policeman, goes to an isolated valley in the remote Murchison region of Western Australia to find his brother - who vanished a month earlier while investigating the murder of a police detective. Do the gold smugglers at Breakaway House hold the answers to the mystery?

'First published as a serial in the Perth Daily News in 1932, the real setting for the book is Mt Magnet, about 150k north of Perth, deep in gold country.' (Publication summary)

'This amazing story - part biography, part true-crime, part thriller - is Ron Iddles' story as told to investigative reporter and author Justine Ford in emotive, homespun and hard-hitting prose.

'It tells the inspiring story of Iddles' incredible life in crime, the working methods and instinct for human behaviour that inform his extraordinary ability to bring light into the shadows, plus his uncanny knack for talking to crooks and winning their trust, not to mention his frequent and unashamed tears for the victims and his quest "to make good out of bad" and for society to "keep each other safe". ' (Publication summary)

'In this, the final book of the Belltree Trilogy, DS Harry Belltree has gone bush. His obsessive pursuit of justice has cost him everything:his job, his marriage and his newborn child:but then his estranged wife disappears, leaving their baby daughter behind, and he is dragged back to Sydney. The police think Jenny has murdered a man. Harry thinks she's in danger. When body parts are found maimed and strewn around a suburban park, his former colleagues are distracted by this apparently unrelated case. Harry is left to track Jenny down on his own:and to lay bare, at last, the extraordinary conspiracy that led to his parents' murder.' (Source: Booktopia website)

'Detective Sergeant Harry Belltree, back on the job after a near-fatal confrontation with corrupt colleagues, has become a departmental embarrassment. The solution is a posting away from Sydney and a quiet life in Newcastle.

'Or maybe not so quiet. A body’s been found buried just offshore on Ash Island; there may be more. There’s also Harry’s unfinished business. The car crash that killed his parents and blinded his wife happened not far from Newcastle. And Harry knows it was no accident.

'The other unfinished business is Jenny’s longed-for pregnancy. Which means that now the stakes are higher than ever.' (Publication summary)

'Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte is on leave, staying with an old friend near Adelaide. Ben Wickham, a meteorologist whose uncannily accurate forecasts have helped farmers all over Australia, until recently lived nearby. But he has died after a three week drinking binge and a doctor certified death resulting from delirium tremens. Yet Bony's host insists that whatever Ben died of, it wasn't alcohol.' (Publication summary)

'Is Sydney gun city? It certainly seems so when Cliff Hardy is hired by entrepreneur and one-time pistol-shooting champion Timothy Greenhall to investigate the violent death of his troubled son. Soon Hardy is pitched into a world of crooked cops - former members of the Gun Control Unit - outlaw bikies and honest police trying to quietly clean the stables.

'Two more murders raise the stakes and relationships are stretched to breaking point. Hardy hooks up with a determined policewoman and forms an unlikely alliance with a charismatic bikie chief.

'Uncovering the tangled conspiracy behind the murders takes Hardy to the Blue Mountains and Camden, to plush legal chambers and a confrontation in an inner-west park - all against the roar of 750cc engines.' (Publication summary)

'Homicide detective Harry Belltree wouldn't usually be looking too hard at an elderly couple's suicide pact. Especially now, when his brother-in-law Greg has just been stabbed to death. But it seems Greg and the old couple had ties to the same man, a bent moneylender with friends in high places—and low.

'Harry can't get officially involved in Greg's murder, but he suspects a link with two other mysterious deaths: his parents'. And when he goes off-grid to investigate, that's when things start to get dangerous.

'Set in Sydney, this dark, morally ambiguous and adrenaline-charged new series is a triumphant change of direction for Barry Maitland.' (Publication summary)

'Broome is a small, sun-drenched town on the barren northwest coast of Australia. It's small enough that everyone knows everyone else's business. How, then, did someone murder two widows in similar fashion and not leave any clues? It's a case for Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, who arrives on the scene incognito. He's barely begun his investigation when a third woman is killed. Bony realises that he is dealing with a madman, and that time is running out to stop a forth murder.'(Publication summary)

'On a vast sheep station in the outback, Raymond Gillen goes swimming in the lake one night and is never seen again. After the failure of local police to solve the mystery, bony arrives disguised as a horse-breaker, and uncovers a story of sexual tension and murder. The lake is evaporating in the intense drought - only when it dies will the mystery be solved. Apart from its strengths as a crime novel, this is probably the best book ever written about drought in Australia.' (Publication summary)