Australian Fiction Mysteries

Australia has always been a land of mysteries. Some are ancient, some are historical and many continue to perplex us today—and will probably continue to do so tomorrow. More often than most of us would like to think, things simply vanish and people disappear without explanation, leaving a trail of heartbreak across generations. Australia also has its fair share of buried loot and fabulous riches gone missing—somewhere. Master storyteller Graham Seal has gathered mysteries from around Australia.

Sometimes work can be murder. Detective Sergeant Kiara Lui has just broken up a loud brawl between two blokes in front of the Warrigal Public Library. But just as she's about to leave the scene, a man plummets from the sky and slams into the bike rack right in front of her, dead. Head of Library Services, Neville Adams, was hated by staff, borrowers, and in fact anybody who had ever met him. What might have tipped that hatred into outright murder? The building is quickly sealed, trapping all the suspects inside.

As the third wave of the virus hits, all inhabitants of Melbourne are given until 8pm to get to their homes. Wherever they are when the curfew hits, they must live for four weeks and stay within a 5km radius. When Lou’s son Samuel doesn’t arrive home by nightfall she begins to panic. He doesn’t answer his phone. He doesn’t message. His social media channels are inactive. Lou is out of her mind with worry, but she can’t go to the police, because she has secrets of her own. Secrets that Samuel just can’t find out about. Lou must find her son herself and bring him home.

When a simple mix-up leaves their father Joe’s estate to Eden, their long-absent mother, Clare and Aaron decide it’s finally time to track Eden down. But it’s been over thirty years since she left their remote outback mining town, and they’ve never heard from her again. Aaron is dealing with a new marriage that’s currently trapped in immigration limbo, and his teenage daughter Cady is clearly going through a personal crisis of her own.

Lenny has always known that his wife, Claire, is the love of his life. But somehow his marriage is in shambles, he’s struggling with the kids, and a string of anonymous text messages are tormenting him, insisting that Claire is a liar. Claire knows Lenny is a good man, but there’s a lot she hasn’t told him about her past. Now she’s terrified that the horrors that haunt her are about to put her entire family in danger. Strange new neighbours, insidious clients and schoolyard scandal begin to fracture Claire and Lenny’s happy families façade.

Who is Audrey Hoedemaker? It's a question her sister Maureen has heard more times than she can count, and she doesn't know what the short answer would be. Little sister, troubled teen, backpacker, musical theatre coach, con artist, childcare worker. Murderer. A tragic, traumatic childhood casts a long shadow on the Hoedemaker sisters. Maureen has worked hard to move beyond the violence of the past and build a good, honest life for herself. Audrey, however, just can't seem to do the same, careening from one state of chaos to another.

Stacey and Laney are twins—mirror images of each other—and yet they’re as different as the sun and the moon. Stacey works hard at school, determined to get out of their small town. Laney skips school and sneaks out of the house to meet her boyfriend. But when Laney disappears one night, Stacey can’t believe she’s just run off without telling her. As the days pass and Laney doesn’t return, Stacey starts dreaming of her twin. The dreams are dark and terrifying, difficult to understand and hard to shake, but at least they tell Stacey one key thing—Laney is alive.

Elise Glyk is a disgraced athlete. Her brother, Callum, is a well-liked teacher who has gone missing. In Elise’s search for her brother, they both become captured in a remote, abandoned farm. Their captor hates Callum, and refuses to explain why, but she has little interest in Elise. So she offers a gruesome bargain: she'll let Elise go - if Elise kills Callum. That way, Elise can't talk to the police, not without getting arrested for murder.

Jackie and Pete King have lived in Dunmore for years, running one of the two local pubs in the sleepy little town. Money has been tight after the bushfires, and it’s about to get tighter if they can’t find a way to pay their suppliers to keep their business going and keep the bank from foreclosing on their property. So when Jackie receives a mysterious phone call offering them $100,000 to let someone bury a body on their land, the answer isn’t as simple as they thought it would be.

Stan Weir is mourning a tragic loss when he meets a mysterious nine-year-old girl, who claims to be the reincarnated spirit of his late wife. Marcy Keef is a single mother trying to make ends meet when her daughter Erin starts describing ‘past life memories’. Neither wants to believe Erin, but as violent secrets are revealed, the truth becomes harder to deny.

To their followers, influencer couple Jess and Nick Brooks are beyond aspirational—they’re proof that you can have it all. They can dance and cook and surf, and somehow, they’re still madly in love despite juggling two young boys, Oliver and Archie. When a brand deal lands the family a free trip to an idyllic Balinese luxury resort, their dream holiday becomes a nightmare when Archie goes missing from the Kids Club. As the hunt for Archie begins, the loving and wholesome family that the Brooks present to their millions of followers starts to unravel.

On the eve of the global lockdown, Don Barlow opens the door of his old beachside cottage to find a pretty girl with pink-tipped hair, claiming to have nowhere to go. He allows her entry, and so begins a mystery set in unprecedented times: with the virus raging outside their home, the girl cannot be asked to leave, but what does he risk by having her stay?

Emma and Ariella, neighbours in one of Sydney’s most exclusive suburbs, appear to have it all—perfect homes, perfect husbands, perfect lives. But they both know dark secrets lurk beneath the surface and shallow waters can’t hide Ariella’s. Now she has been found murdered. Her daughter filmed the killing. Not knowing what she’s filmed, Emma’s daughter Kiki innocently uploads footage of Ariella’s brutal death. Emma fears the worst—the killer will know what she and Kiki have seen. Their safe suburban lives no longer exist.

Flynn was only a teenager when her parents were killed in a terrible accident. Too young to lose her parents, too young to take on responsibility for her younger sister Kaiya, too young to protect Kaiya from the harshness of their new lives in the following years. Desperate to help her sister, Flynn reaches out to Willa Tomlinson, a grief counsellor renowned for helping her patients cope with profound loss. Under Willa’s influence and care, Kaiya finally seems to turn a corner, joining the climate action collective that Willa leads.

Emma Cameron, a recently divorced farmer and a local in Barker, runs Deception Creek, the farm that three generations of her family have owned before her. Every day, Emma pushes herself hard on the land, hoping to make 10-year-old memories of a terrible car accident disappear. And now, there are more recent nightmares of an ex-husband who refuses to understand how much the farm means to Emma. When Joel Hammond is released from jail and heads home to Barker, Detective Dave Burrows and his officer, Senior Sergeant Jack Higgins, are on high alert.

Jenny Williams became a cop and moved to the middle of nowhere to solve a family mystery. Now, the case surrounding her cousin has been closed, she realises she can’t go back to city life. She loves the quirky locals, the outback policing and most of all, she’s in love with local station owner Nick Johnston. Juggling her work and farm life is proving difficult, but when a weekend on the cattle property turns into official police business, Jenny finds herself desperately searching for the owner of an abandoned vehicle.

Journey through the colonies of 19th-century Australia with three stand-alone novels of love, loss, survival, and redemption. In 1806, a fateful decision sends Eleanor Marling from the salons of London to a prison ship bound for New South Wales. She is put to work at the female factory of Parramatta. English settler Grace Ashwell flees an abusive lover in Hobart Town, with six-year-old Violet in tow. Deep in the wilderness, they find a crude hut inhabited by an escaped convict long presumed dead.

Sri Lanka, 2009. Decades of civil war and bloodshed are being brought to an end at last – by any means necessary. In the capital, Colombo, tenacious journalist Ameena Fernando is murdered, execution-style, on a busy street near her home, with no witnesses. With pressure growing to find Ameena’s killers, CIA agent Ellie Harper is sent to seek justice for the journalist’s death with strict instructions: Find something, but not too much. It’s her first time returning to the island after her last mission went tragically awry four years prior, and Ellie has more than one ghost to lay to rest.

It's a blindingly hot summer. International visitors surge into Sydney's Darling Harbour. Two-year-old Tommy is sailing his toy boat in the park there with his mother Phoebe. Tommy vanishes into thin air. The following winter, taunting notes written as nursery rhymes begin arriving at his parents' home. Little Boy Blue, where did you go? Who led you away? Only I know.

As Inspector Lestrade asks "why, gentlemen, would someone break into a house, murder the owner and then steal only one volume of an Australian atlas, when all three volumes were there for the taking," more atlases are stolen before Holmes solves the mystery.