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.
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 scorchingly good novel' MICHAEL ROBOTHAM
'Disher is the gold standard for rural noir' CHRIS HAMMER
AN ACT OF INEXPLICABLE CRUELTY. A FAMILY DESTROYED.
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 his community work - welfare checks and a light touch - is starting to pay off. Now Christmas is here and, apart from a grass fire, two boys stealing a vehicle, 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 an incident on Kitchener Street, a strange and vicious attack that sickens the community. And when the Sydney police ask him to look in on a family living on a forgotten back road, it doesn't look like a season of goodwill at all...
'In this brilliant novel, Disher takes his readers on a harrowing journey' JOCK SERONG
'There has been a lot of fuss about Australian rural noir in recent years, but few, if any, do it better than Disher' Canberra Weekly
'An utterly compelling mystery with rare heart and humanity' DERVLA MCTIERNAN
'Peter Temple and Garry Disher will be identified as the crime writers who redefined Australian crime fiction' Sydney Morning Herald
Garry Disher has published fifty titles across multiple genres, and is best known as Australia's King of Crime. He has won the Deutsche Krimi Preis three times, the Ned Kelly Award twice, and his novel The Sunken Road was nominated for the Booker. In 2018 he received the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award.
A pair of hit men working a job for a meth kingpin have a very bad day, and the resulting bushfire draws attention to a drug lab and two bodies burned up in a Mercedes. Sergeant Ellen Destry-newly minted head of her department's sex crime unit-and Inspector Hal Challis return in this newest installment of Gary Disher's Peninsula-based crimes series. With meth-related crime on the rise, interdepartmental tensions mount, and Challis soon finds himself fighting to keep control of his case. Meanwhile, Destry is hunting for a serial rapist who is extremely adept at not leaving clues. A tense, human, at times darkly funny entry into Disher's celebrated, Ned Kelly Award-winning series.
Hirsh was a promising metropolitan officer - until he blew the whistle on a case of police corruption. Now he's been exiled to a one-cop station in South Australia's wheatbelt. Called a dog by his own cop brothers. So when he's sent to investigate gunfire up isolated Bitter Wash Road he suspects his 'back-up' might be the one to put a bullet in him. He's wrong. But the events that unfold turn out to be a lot more sinister.
An unidentified man is fished out of the sea with an anchor strapped to his waist. And for D.I. 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...
Constable Paul Hirschhausen—“Hirsch”—is a recently demoted detective sent from Adelaide, Australia’s southernmost booming metropolis, to Tiverton, a one-road town in rustic, backwater “wool and wheat” country three hours north. Hirsch is more than just a disgraced cop, a rumored whistle-blower—internal investigations is still trying to convict him of something, even if it means planting evidence, and someone has a bullet they’d like to put in his head, as has been made clear by the pistol cartridge left in his mailbox.
Hirsch is just trying to keep his job, but the tiny town of Tiverton has more crime than one lone cop should have to handle. The stagnant economy, rural isolation, and entrenched racism and misogyny mean every case Hirsch investigates is a new basket of snakes. And when the body of a sixteen-year-old local girl is found on the side of the highway, the situation gets even more sinister. Whether or not he finds her killer, there’s going to be hell to pay.
“Disher has drawn both a vivid and visceral picture of a backblocks bush town, its inhabitants ground down by the stresses of isolation, hard work, and irregular, relentlessly shrinking incomes…The story pulls no punches.”—Guardian (London)
The winner of numerous prizes for his eclectic body of work, Garry Disher pens this razor-sharp police procedural from his popular Challis/Destry series. Now that they are lovers, Challis and Destry must guard their affections closely, for romantic relationships are against department regulations. This complicates matters as they investigate the brutal assault on a private school chaplain as well as the murder of a public official.
Garry Disher crafts sharp police procedurals with a distinctive down-under flair. A young girl has been abducted on Australia's Mornington Peninsula and Sergeant Ellen Destry takes the case in Inspector Hal Challis' absence.
D.I. Hal Challis is in trouble with the boss and missing his lover, Ellen Destry, who is overseas. But there's plenty to keep his mind off his problems. A rapist in a police uniform stalks Challis's Peninsula beat, there is a serial armed robber headed in his direction and a home invasion that's a little too close to home. Not to mention a very clever, very mysterious female cat burglar who may or may not be planning something on Challis's patch.
When hordes of eighteen-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 D. I. 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.
Ten-year-old Katie Blasko is missing. Detective Sergeant Ellen Destry, alert to rumours of a paedophile ring operating on the Peninsula, is thinking abduction. Her colleagues are thinking bad family, truancy. Her boss is thinking about the media. Her partner D. I. Hal Challis is a thousand kilometres away, watching his father die, and everyone, including Ellen, is wondering whether she's good enough to handle this without him.
