Australian Crime Fiction

Ten years ago, six teenagers hiked into the Blue Mountains wilderness - and only five came out alive. The survivors have barely seen each other since the tragic bushwalk.

Yet when an invitation arrives to attend a 10-year memorial of their friend's death, Hugh, Charlotte, Alex, Laura and Jack find themselves travelling back into the rugged landscape where it all began. The weekend at an isolated homestead in the bush - no phone signal, no distractions - should be a chance to reflect and reconnect. But each of the friends has been carrying secrets from the fateful hike.

And someone will stop at nothing to get the truth.

A bomb at his book launch. Gunfire in his hometown. Someone wants journalist Martin Scarsden dead. Fleeing for his life into the outback, he learns that nowhere is safe.

The killers are closing in, and it's all he can do to survive. But who wants to kill him - and why?

With nowhere left to run, Martin finds his fate in the hands of some surprising individuals: a disgraced ex-wife of a footballer, a fugitive wanted for a decades-old murder and two nineteenth century explorers from a legendary expedition, whose fate may hold the key to his own. With his life on the line, one thing is for sure: in the scorching heart of Australia, Martin Scarsden's most dangerous assignment isn't just a story - it's survival.

The classic, atmospheric Australian thriller about the mysterious disappearance of a group of young girls. A cloudless summer day in the year nineteen hundred... Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock.

After lunch, a group of three girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of Hanging Rock. Further, higher, till at last they disappeared. They never returned.

Is Picnic at Hanging Rock fact or fiction? Only you can truly decide.

Constable Paul 'Hirsch' Hirschhausen is a whistle-blower. Formerly a promising metropolitan detective, now hated and despised, he's been exiled to a one-cop station in South Australia's wheatbelt. So when he heads up Bitter Wash Road to investigate gunfire and finds himself cut off without backup, there are two possibilities.

Either he's found the fugitive killers thought to be in the area. Or his 'backup' is about to put a bullet in him. He's wrong on both counts.

But Tiverton - with its stagnant economy, entrenched racism and rural isolation - has more crime than one constable can handle. And when the next call-out takes him to the body of a sixteen-year-old girl, it's clear that whether or not Hirsch finds her killer, his past may well catch up with him.

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.