When hordes of 18-year-olds descend on the Mornington Peninsula to celebrate the end of exams, a brutal bashing attracts political attention. The victim is connected, and now DI Hal Challis is facing interference from on high. Newly embarked on a relationship with his Sergeant, Ellen Destry, Challis doesn't need the brass looking over his shoulder. Then a bludgeoned corpse is found outside town, and it's clear something much darker than adolescent craziness is going down.

Summer on the Peninsula. The heat’s ramping up, the usual holiday madness building. D.I. Hal Challis is already recycling his shower water and starting to dread Christmas. But this year there’s something more. Women abducted and murdered on the Old Highway. A pall of fear over the scorched paddocks. The media are demanding answers - and Challis’s sleepy beat is set to explode.

An unidentified man is fished out of the sea with an anchor strapped to his waist. And for DI Hal Challis, this sparks the beginning of a chilling series of shotgun killings. As Challis investigates, a farmer on the peninsula erupts into violence and is the target of a massive manhunt. And then Challis finds some aerial photographs in the possession of his friend Kitty that link her to the murders....

A small bushfire, but nasty enough for ice cooks to abandon their lab. Fatal, too. But when the bodies in the burnt-out Mercedes prove to be a pair of Sydney hitmen, DI Hal Challis' inquiries into a local ice epidemic take a darker turn. Meanwhile, Ellen Destry, head of the new sex crimes unit, finds herself not only juggling the personalities of her team but hunting a serial rapist who leaves no evidence behind.

Wyatt steals $50,000 and a sought-after piece of jewellery in a burglary of a politician's house. Wyatt snatches the cash easily enough. He bypasses the alarm system, eludes the cops, makes it safely back to his bolthole in Hobart. It's the diamond-studded Tiffany brooch—and perhaps the girl—that brings him undone. Now some very hard people want to put Wyatt and that brooch out of circulation. But this is Wyatt's game and Wyatt sets the rules—even if it means a reckoning somewhere far from home.

Wyatt robs banks and payroll vans. Most men like him are dead or in jail, but Wyatt stamps a cold, pitiless style on his heists and has never been caught. Now his funds are low and his luck is running out - until the day Anna Reid explains about the kickback in her partner’s safe. But other players are involved. In Wyatt’s world, there is no yielding, no redemption, and when he’s crossed, the outcome is inevitable.

After the heists gone wrong in Kickback and Paydirt, Wyatt is further down on his luck and deeper in with the Outfit, a network of organised criminals whose attention he's tried hard to avoid. A risky job in a Brisbane bank and the return of a femme fatale add further complications to Wyatt's increasingly desperate situation and force him to decide who he is and who he cares about.

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 concerns are a call from the high school, a teacher worried about a student who may be in danger at home. Another call, a different school: a man enraged about the principal’s treatment of his daughter.

Some people just work better alone. Wyatt’s one of them. He’s been getting by on nice quiet little burglaries - one-man jobs - when he gets wind of something bigger. A corporate crook, notorious Ponzi schemer, set to face court and certain jail time. He’s about to skip bail the old-fashioned way: on a luxury yacht with a million dollars in cash. Wyatt thinks it sounds like something he should get into. He’s not alone.

Detective Alan Auhl does things his own way - and gets results. He works cold cases now. Like the death of John Elphick - his daughters are 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.... 

A dark and unsettling tale, set at the turn of the 20th century, that will stay with you long after you finish listening - from a master of Australian literature. Out in that country, the sun smeared the sky and nothing ever altered, except that one day a scrap man came by.... Her name is scarcely known or remembered. All in all, she is worth less than the nine shillings and sixpence counted into her father's hand. She bides her time. She does her work. Way back in the corner of her mind is a thought she is almost too frightened to shine a light on: one day she will run away.

Constable Paul Hirschhausen runs a one-cop 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. Suddenly, it doesn’t look like a season of goodwill at all.

Wyatt made some powerful enemies in his first three outings, and the time has come to confront them. But we know by now that Wyatt’s revenge won’t be showy, impetuous and futile; it will be pragmatic, elaborate—and still possibly futile. He holes up in Sydney, preparing to return home to Melbourne to play his enemies against each other in a dangerous double-cross that will tear down the notions of loyalty and obligation.

In the desolate outback town of Finnigans Gap, police struggle to maintain law and order. Thieves pillage opal mines, religious fanatics recruit vulnerable young people, and billionaires do as they please. Then an opal miner is found crucified and left to rot down his mine. Nothing about the miner's death is straightforward, not even who found the body. Sydney homicide detective Ivan Lucic is sent to investigate, assisted by inexperienced young investigator Nell Buchanan.

The small town of Nannine lies in the harsh red interior of New South Wales. Once a thriving outback centre, years of punishing drought have whittled it down to no more than a couple of pubs and a police station. And its one sinister claim to fame: the still-unsolved disappearance of Evelyn McCreery 19 years ago from the bedroom she shared with her twin sister. Mina McCreery's life has been defined by the intense and ongoing public interest in her sister's case. Now an anxious and reclusive adult, Mina lives alone on her family's sunbaked destocked sheep farm.