Australian Crime Fiction

Summer is approaching on the Mornington Peninsula, Australia. The heat is ramping up, a drought has been forecast, and Detective Inspector Hal Challis is already recycling his shower water and dreading the upcoming holiday madness. But then he's called to the sleepy town of Waterloo, where there's something more to fear.

Women are being abducted and murdered, their bodies found along the Old Highway. The media demand answers, and with a team who cause as much trouble as they solve, Challis is under increasing pressure. But this killer's business is far from over...

Amid the worst drought to ravage Australia in a century, it hasn't rained in small country town Kiewarra for two years. Tensions in the community become unbearable when three members of the Hadler family are brutally murdered.

Everyone thinks Luke Hadler, who committed suicide after slaughtering his wife and six-year-old son, is guilty. Policeman Aaron Falk returns to the town of his youth for the funeral of his childhood best friend, and is unwillingly drawn into the investigation. As questions mount and suspicion spreads through the town, Falk is forced to confront the community that rejected him twenty years earlier.

Because Falk and Luke Hadler shared a secret, one which Luke's death threatens to unearth. And as Falk probes deeper into the killings, secrets from his past and why he left home bubble to the surface as he questions the truth of his friend's crime.

Mary Fortune's dramatic crime stories, set in colonial-era Australia, comprise the first detective fiction series written by a woman; they also provide a vivid account of life and death in a country in rapid flux, as the huge population increase following the discovery of gold in 1851 led to great riches for some, poverty and violence for others.

Born in Ireland in 1832, Fortune emigrated to Australia during the goldrush, which she observed first-hand and depicted in many of her stories. A bigamous marriage to a policeman gave her inside knowledge to write about crime, and over the next 40 years she produced more than 500 stories, serialized under the title The Detective's Album in the mass-circulation magazine The Australian Journal. She tackled subjects such as murder, armed robbery, bootlegging, and sexual violence with a frankness unprecedented for a woman in the 19th century.

This book collects 18 of Fortune's finest stories, while also showcasing her range as a writer-from melodrama and Gothic horror to social realism and what we now call noir. Mary Fortune lived a precarious existence-repeatedly jailed for public drunkenness, homeless on occasion, unable to prevent her illegitimate son George drifting into a life of crime. She preserved her privacy by publishing under pseudonyms, most commonly 'Waif Wander' (or 'W.W.')-it is a measure of her fame at the time that a racehorse and a greyhound were both named after Waif Wander. But her anonymity meant that when she died in 1911, she was almost lost to literary history. Only recently has her true identity and her extraordinary life story emerged.

Edited by Lucy Sussex and Megan Brown.

DS Lucas Walker is on leave in his hometown, Caloodie, taking care of his dying grandmother.

When two young German backpackers, Berndt and Rita, vanish from the area, he finds himself unofficially on the case. But why all the interest from the Federal Police when they have probably just ditched the heat and dust of the outback for the coast? Working in the organised crime unit has opened Walker's eyes to the growing drug trade in Australia's remote interior - and he becomes convinced there is more at play. As the number of days since the couple's disappearance climbs, Walker is joined by Rita's older sister.

A detective herself with Berlin CID, she has flown to Australia - desperate to find her sister. Their search becomes ever more urgent as temperatures soar. Even if Walker does find the young couple, will it be too late?