Cirrus@Austlit

'It takes months for Australian social psychologist Janine McQuarrie to succumb to her husband’s pressure to attend spouse-swapping parties, but eventually she gives in. Then, driving with her young daughter one day, she gets out of her car to ask directions and is shot and killed. The little girl escapes when the gunman’s pistol misfires.

'Inspector Hal Challis of the Crime Investigation Unit is assigned the case, but his efforts are thwarted by his boss. The dead woman was Superintendent McQuarrie’s daughter-in-law, and he seems to be more interested in protecting his son than in finding his daughter-in-law’s murderer. Who might have a motive to kill this attractive young wife and mother? One of her clients? One of the swingers she’d gotten together with at a party? Or, the obvious suspect, her husband?'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Soho Crime ed.).

'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.

'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)

'Belfast 1988: a man has been shot in the back with an arrow. It ain't Injuns and it isn't Robin Hood. But uncovering exactly who has done it will take Detective Inspector Sean Duffy down his most dangerous road yet, a road that leads to a lonely clearing on the high bog where three masked gunmen will force Duffy to dig his own grave. Hunted by forces unknown, threatened by Internal Affairs and with his relationship on the rocks, Duffy will need all his wits to get out of this investigation in one piece.' (Publication summary)

'A missing two-year-old girl, an unidentified drowning victim, arson, and the threat of murder bring Homicide Squad Inspector Hal Challis of the Mornington Peninsula Police Force and his staff to Bushrangers Bay, an Australian seaside resort outside Melbourne. Allis not idyllic in this resort community—far from it. Cars are stolen and torched; letter boxes are burned; and the Kittyhawk airplane of an attractive aerial photographer suffers malicious damage.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Soho Crime ed.).

'Belfast, 1985. Gunrunners on the borders, riots in the cities, The Power of Love on the radio. And somehow, in the middle, Detective Inspector Sean Duffy is hanging on, a Catholic policeman in the hostile Royal Ulster Constabulary.

'Duffy is initially left cold by the murder of a wealthy couple, shot dead while watching TV. And when their troubled son commits suicide, leaving a note that appears to take responsibility for the deaths, it seems the case is closed. But something doesn't add up, and people keep dying. Soon Duffy is on the trail of a mystery that will pit him against shadowy US intelligence forces, and take him into the white-hot heart of the biggest political scandal of the decade. ' (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)

'Sean Duffy knows there's no such thing as a perfect crime. But a torso in a suitcase is pretty close.

'Still, one tiny clue is all it takes, and there it is. A tattoo. So Duffy, fully fit and back at work after the severe trauma of his last case, is ready to follow the trail of blood - however faint - that always, always connects a body to its killer.

'A legendarily stubborn man, Duffy becomes obsessed with this mystery as a distraction from the ruins of his love life, and to push down the seed of self-doubt that he seems to have traded for his youthful arrogance.

'So from country lanes to city streets, Duffy works every angle. And wherever he goes, he smells a rat ...' (Publisher's blurb)

'When hordes of eighteen-year-olds descend on the Peninsula to celebrate the end of exams, the overstretched police of Waterloo know what to expect. Party drugs, public drunkenness; maybe even drink-spiking and sexual assault.

'What they don't count on is a brutal bashing that turns political. The victim is connected. And for Detective Inspector Hal Challis, newly embarked on a relationship with his sergeant, Ellen Destry, this is not the best time to have the brass on his back. Especially when a bludgeoned corpse is found outside town and it becomes clear something much darker than adolescent craziness is going down.' (From the publisher's website.)

'Now, somehow, Emily's become the Aboriginal Community Police Officer for the outback (not to mention throwback) township of Bluebush.

'Being allergic both to authority and to keeping her big mouth shut, she's immediately at odds with her new boss. And a death at the Green Swamp Well Roadhouse just makes things worse.

'Officially it's a simple case of two old drunks and a hammer.Emily's not convinced.

'Fast, funny and action-packed - Gunshot Road is Australia's literary thriller of the year. (From the publisher's website.)

'One suburban morning in Summer 1970, Peter van Rijn, proprietor of the television and wireless shop, realises that his suburb is 100 years old. He contacts the Mayor, who assembles a Committee, and celebrations are eagerly planned. That same morning, just a few streets way, Rita is awakened by a dream of her husband's snores. It is years since Vic moved north, and left their house of empty silences, yet his life remains bound up with hers. Their son, too, has moved on - Michael is at university, exploring new ideas and the heady world of grown-up love. Yet Rita still stubbornly stays in the old street, unable to imagine leaving the house she has tended so lovingly for so long. Instead she has taken on the care of another house as well - that of the widowed Mrs Webster, owner of the suburb's landmark factory, now in decline. As these lives entwine, and the Committee commissions its centenary mural and prepares to commemorate Progress, History - in the shape of the new, post-war generation represented by Michael and his friends - is heading straight for them...'

(Source: Publisher's blurb)

'The history of his summer is written in the grass ... In 1960 the West Indies arrive in Australia, bringing with them a carnival of music, colour and possibility. Michael, who is sixteen, is enthralled. If, like his heroes, he has the gift of speed, he will move beyond his suburb into the great world ... And yet, as his summer unfolds, Michael realises that there are other ways to live. When the calypso chorus accompanying Frank Worrell and his team fades, Michael has learnt many things ... about his parents, his suburb, a girl called Kathleen Marsden, and about himself.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'On a hot summer's night in the 1950s, the old and the new, diesel and steam, town and country all collide - and nobody will be left unaffected.

'As a passenger train leaves Spencer Street Station on its haul to Sydney, a family of three - Vic, Rita and their son Michael - are off to a party. George Bedser has invited the whole neighbourhood to celebrate the engagement of his daughter. Vic is an engine driver, with dreams of being like his hero Paddy Ryan and becoming the master of the smooth ride. As the neighbours walk to the party, we are drawn into the lives of a bully, a drunk, a restless girl and a young boy forced to grow up before he is ready. The Art of the Engine Driver is a luminous and evocative tale of ordinary suburban lives, told with an extraordinary power.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The woolshed at Mistake Springs has an east-west alignment...

'There is tricky magnetic country near Mount Behn...

'The Wyndham airstrip is sticky when wet...

'There was a time when Neil Quiller's logbooks had kept him safe in the air. But it's 1941 now, he's a photo-reconnaissance pilot in Malaya, and Kimberley landmarks are no good to him at all.

'Betrayed by a spy and shot down over the jungle, Quiller escapes to Singapore ahead of the advancing Japanese. Here he finds love and freindship but is also unsettled to encounter his cousin, Cameron Dunn, who demands from him an impossible promise.

'Meanwhile, as Japanese fighter-planes and cyclonic winds lurk along the north-west coast of Australia, Jeannie Verco runs Haarlem Downs, the Kimberley cattle station where Cameron was born and Neil grew up, and waits for war news that never comes.

'When Singapore falls, Quiller, armed with hand-drawn maps, a school atlas and an increasing longing for home, begins a treacherous journey across land and sea.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Three thousand years after a devastating global thermonuclear war, the desolate wastes of Australia support a myriad of primitive tribal nations, bound by superstition and xenophobia. Legend says the world was destroyed by the fiery love of Sister Sun, who betrayed her husband, Father Moon, to have an illicit affair with her own sister. Young Ilgar of the nomadic Ilkari is a Moon-talker, a sort of shaman whose nocturnal visions carry prophetic messages from Father Moon. Returning home after a particularly troubling vision, Ilgar and his friends are attacked by Nightstalkers, the cold, pale People of the Caves who only come out to hunt at night. Ilgar survives with the help of S'shony, a young Nightstalker female who's grown disillusioned with her race and longs for a richer life. Quickly the two fall in love, and Ilgar takes S'shony with him, disguising her as one of the mythical Children of Father Moon. After learning of the attack, Ilgar's tribe sends him off with S'shony and a few others to gather an army from all the tribes to destroy the Nightstalkers once and for all'.

Source: bookseller's website.