Showing results by publisher "Wavesound from W. F. Howes Ltd" in Crime Thrillers

Hal and his little brother have just come to live in Moorabool. They're exploring the creek near their new home when they find the body of a dog. Not just dead, but killed. Not just killed, but horribly maimed. Constable Mick Goodenough, recently demoted from his big-city job as a detective, is also new in town—and one of his dogs has gone missing. Like other pets around the town. He knows what it means when someone tortures animals to death. They're practicing. When Hal's mother starts getting late-night phone calls, Goodenough, alone among the Moorabool cops, takes her seriously.

Someone is targeting Martin Scarsden. They bomb his book launch and shoot up his hometown. Fleeing for his life, he learns that nowhere is safe, not even the outback. The killers are closing in, and it's all he can do to survive. But who wants to kill him and why? Can he discover their deadly motives and turn the tables?

A late-night phone call is never good news for Homicide Detective Sergeant Rose Riley. This time she's being sent up to the Hunter Valley, where a woman has been found dead in her home. Rose grew up further along the valley. She knows that for every vineyard and golf course resort visited by tourists to the 'wine country', there are as many dilapidated fibro houses and drug dens, in the shadow of one of the state's largest prisons.

A summer of relentless heat. A local surfer named Ray Carlson is found dead in a house not far from Portsea back beach. There’s a silver-handled kitchen knife deep in his chest, and blood everywhere. Detective Sergeant Zoe Mayer is scarcely back from extended leave and still wrestling with her demons, but she is assigned the case, alongside her new service dog, Harry, whose instincts help her in unexpected ways.

In the wild coastal town of Merritt, Alex Tillerson and her mother make a shocking find on the beach. The police claim it’s an accidental death, but there are whispers of murder and that it is not the first. Bella Greggs was found dead at the bottom of a ravine but drowned in salt water. Maxine McFarlane was pulled from the ocean but with no water in her lungs. Black feathers were found with both bodies, but what do they mean?

A controversial entrepreneur is murdered in a remote mountain valley, but this is no ordinary case. Ivan and Nell are soon contending with cowboy lawyers, conmen, bullion thieves and grave robbers. But it's when Nell discovers the victim is a close blood relative, that the past begins to take on a looming significance. What did take place in The Valley all those years ago? What was Nell's mother doing there, and what was her connection to troubled young police officer Simmons Burnside?

Twenty years ago, ornithology student Jessica Weston filmed a lyrebird mimicking the dying screams of a woman in the Barrington Tops National Park. Terrified, she took her recordings to the Maitland police to report a murder. Despite support from newly minted detective, Megan Blaxland, no one was reported missing in the area and no body found, so Jessica's claims were mocked and dismissed. Twenty years later, a body is unearthed. Exactly where Jessica said it would be.

Yuwonderie's seven founding families have lorded it over their district for a century, growing ever more rich and powerful. But now—in startling circumstances—one of their own is found dead in a ditch and homicide detectives Ivan Lucic and Nell Buchanan are sent to investigate. Could the murder be connected to the execution of the victim's friend thirty years ago—another member of The Seven—or even to the long-forgotten story of a servant girl on the brink of the Great War?

Olivia is hiding from vicious media and online scrutiny in a remote Tasmanian house when an unknown man knocks on her door, seeking Pippa, a woman who once lived there. His father, Jeremy, has died, leaving behind a letter for the unknown woman. Olivia wants to help, but can she risk revealing her own sordid past and exposure to the world once more?

Successful horse trainer Alissa Morgan–Jones has the world at her feet, until a tragic fire destroys everything. Widowed, in debt and under suspicion for arson, Alissa's life is in tatters. Her mother–in–law's isolated farm gives her the opportunity to pull her life back together and get herself back on her feet. Four years after fleeing the city and the scandal that ruined his career, disgraced lawyer Cameron Blakely has a successful new business and a new life.

For half a lifetime, journalist Martin Scarsden has run from his past. But now there is no escaping. He'd vowed never to return to his hometown, Port Silver, and its traumatic memories. But now his new partner, Mandy Blonde, has inherited an old house in the seaside town and Martin knows their chance of a new life together won't come again. Martin arrives to find his best friend from school days brutally murdered, and Mandy the chief suspect. With the police curiously reluctant to pursue other suspects, Martin goes searching for the killer. And finds the past waiting for him.

When Senior Detective Antigone Pollard moves to the coastal town of Deception Bay, she is still in shock and grief. Back in Melbourne, one of her cases had gone catastrophically wrong, and to escape the guilt and the haunting memories, she'd requested a transfer to the quiet town she'd grown up in. But there are some things you can't run from. A month into her new life, she is targeted by a would-be rapist at the pub, and realises why there have been no convictions following a spate of similar sexual attacks in the surrounding district.

In Canberra, a federal election looms and Cassius Calvert, Minister for Border Integrity, is facing a new hard-line policy regarding asylum-seekers. Off the Indonesian island of Dana, Isi Natoli, skipper of the Java Ridge, and a group of Australian surf tourists are anchored beside an idyllic reef. A few kilometres away, Roya and her mother are amongst the passengers fleeing persecution aboard the Talakar. When a storm breaks, these stories collide with chilling consequences....

On her lunch break in Melbourne, Kim Leamy is approached by a stranger investigating the disappearance of a little girl from her Kentucky home 28 years earlier. He believes Kim is that girl. At first she brushes it off but soon finds herself questioning her family history and begins to unravel an unexpectedly dark past.

When human remains are discovered in a forest, police are baffled, the locals are shocked and one group of old friends starts to panic. Their long-held secret is about to be uncovered. It all began in 1999 when sixteen-year-old Aaron ran away from home, drawing his friends into an unforeseeable chain of events that no one escaped from unscathed. In The Ledge, past and present run breathlessly parallel, leading to a cliff-hanger nobody will see coming. This is a mind-bending new novel from the master of the unexpected.

Steels Creek is an idyllic retreat in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. It's a place where everyone knows their neighbors and no one locks their doors. Investigative journalist Lars Nilsson who has moved to the settlement following a public fall from grace is trying to live a quiet life far from the crime reporting he was once feted for. But when a backpacker's body is found floating in a nearby waterhole and hours later his best friend's daughter is reported missing, Lars is compelled to investigate, putting him back in the cross-hairs of police.

Harlow Close has made a career as an influencer uncovering the secrets of Winnipeg, dubbed ‘North America's strangest city'. The region is renowned for its sub-zero temperatures, dropping to minus 40 degrees—sometimes for months at a time. Yet, it's not just the frigid winters and geographic seclusion that render Winnipeg peculiar. When Harlow's father mysteriously disappears amidst a particularly brutal cold snap, suspicions of foul play arise. It's not like Scott to miss phone calls—and he's been even more cautious since that time he was catfished by a romance scammer.

While walking on an isolated track in the windswept Wimmera, rock-climber Skye discovers the body of a young woman. The body has injuries that suggest a rock-climbing accident, but it's been found more than 5km from the nearest cliffs at Mount Arapiles. Police ask Skye to help them navigate the perilous world of rock climbing as they try to unravel what happened. Skye is secretly thrilled to be part of the investigation, but as it becomes clear that a killer is on the loose, all thrill turns to fear. In the isolated crags of the mountain, stark beauty can conceal horrific truths.

Adam Bowman, a battling journalist who grew up as the son of a teacher at Prince Albert College, might be the only one who can uncover the links between the school murder and the 'Blue Moon Killer'. But he will have to go into the darkest places of his childhood to piece together the clues. Detective Sergeant Rose Riley, meanwhile, is part of the taskforce desperately trying to find the killer before he strikes again. Adam Bowman's excavation of his past might turn out to be Rose's biggest trump card or it may bring the whole investigation crashing down, and put her own life in danger.

Grace is a thief: a good one. She was taught by experts, and she's been practicing since she was a kid. She specializes in small, high-value items—stamps, watches—and she knows her Jaeger-LeCoultres from her Patek Philippes. But it's a solitary life, always watchful, always moving. It's not the life she wants.