Cirrus@Austlit

'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)

'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)

'Evan's job is to help people die.

'Evan is a nurse - a suicide assistant. His job is legal - just. He's the one at the hospital who hands out the last drink to those who ask for it.

'Evan's friends don't know what he does during the day. His mother, Viv, doesn't know what he's up to at night. And his supervisor suspects there may be trouble ahead.

'As he helps one patient after another die, Evan pushes against the limits of the law - and his own morality. And with Viv increasingly unwell, his love life complicated, to say the least, Evan begins to wonder who might be there for him, when the time comes.' (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.).

'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)

'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.)

'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.

'A serial killer is on the loose in a small coastal town near Melbourne, Australia. Detective Inspector Hal Challis and his team must apprehend him before he strikes again. But first, Challis has to contend with the editor of a local newspaper who undermines his investigation at every turn, and with his wife, who attempts to resurrect their marriage through long-distance phone calls from a sanitarium, where she has been committed for the past eight years for attempted murder—his.'

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

'In 1982, Sally Morgan travelled back to her grandmother's birthplace. What started as a tentative search for information about her family, turned into an overwhelming emotional and spiritual pilgrimage. My Place is a moving account of a search for truth into which a whole family is gradually drawn, finally freeing the tongues of the author's mother and grandmother, allowing them to tell their own stories.' Source: Publisher's blurb.

'... Jangamuttuk is an ageing Aborigine shaman whose people have been relocated to an island off the Australian coast under the control of a former bricklayer turned missionary. Jangamuttuk helps them come to terms with the invaders' presence and, at the same time, offers them a restorative vision of community by entering into "the dreaming," a magical time every bit as real as conventional reality. ...' (Source: Amazon website)