Australian Crime Fiction New Releases 2025

Ruth Dawson has taken a break from big city law to fill in for a few months for an old mate in Myddle. How hard can it be? she thinks. Turns out, very hard. 

So when Ruth hears the front door of her office open, she's expecting a weird demand, or a question she doesn't know the answer to ... but it's Bea Baulderstone's mum, worried that she hasn't seen her seventeen-year-old daughter for five days, and Constable Gazza Parker is refusing to report the girl missing. Easily fixed, thinks Ruth, and heads off down Myddle's main street to charm Gazza into action. 

But Victoria Baulderstone was right: Gazza doesn't care. That is until Dash Rogers is found at his farm gate, dead from a gunshot wound, and suddenly the town is very interested in Bea's whereabouts. 

And it's not just Bea who can't be found. Dash's wife Evie is AWOL too. 

Then Troy, Evie's protege and Bea's only friend, also smoke-bombs.

Rain slicked streets, riots, murder, chaos. It's July 1992 and the Troubles in Northern Ireland are still grinding on after twenty-five apocalyptic years. Detective Inspector Sean Duffy got his family safely over the water to Scotland, to "Shortbread Land". Duffy's a part-timer now, only returning to Belfast six days a month to get his pension. It's an easy gig, if he can keep his head down.

But then a murder case falls into his lap while his protege is on holiday in Spain. A carjacking gone wrong and the death of a solitary, middle-aged painter. But something's not right, and as Duffy probes he discovers the painter was an IRA assassin. So, the question becomes: Who hit the hitman and why?

This is Duffy's most violent and dangerous case yet and the whole future of the burgeoning "peace process" may depend upon it. Based on true events, Duffy must unentangle parallel operations by the CIA, MI5 and Special Branch. Duffy attempts to bring a killer to justice while trying to keep himself and his team alive as everything unravels around them. They might not all make it out of this one.

That afternoon, when the police and then my mother finally arrived, they found me sitting beside Marlowe holding her hand and talking to her: about a boy I had a crush on, about the buttery yellow jumpsuit I had seen in a shop window that would look perfect on her; about those two cups of half-drunk coffee sitting on the table. Who was with you, Marlowe?

In March of 1989, Emmerson Kerr is alone.

One morning listening to her Walkman, a newsreader's words stop her dead. 'A warning to our listeners that this story is graphic in nature. The body of an 84-year-old woman has been found in the foyer of her apartment building on Sydney's lower North Shore ... '

Emmerson stood, held in place like an anchor, like a nail in wood, like the breath of a frightened woman alone in her home. She listened to the details and remembered back to that day, twelve years before, in her grandmother's Paddington studio. The 1977 murder of Marlowe Kerr - Sydney's art darling and socialite, a woman known for her lavish parties and her world-famous designs, but known to Emmerson as her colourful, loving grandmother - never solved.

New Year's Eve, Loloma Island, Fiji. At one of the most exclusive island resorts in the Pacific ocean, the champagne is poured, the fireworks are ready, and the countdown to new year is just beginning. It's set to be a night that no one will forget.

Especially when a body washes up on the shore...

But it's impossible to find answers when everyone here has a motive.

The billionaire's daughter, glamorous, untouchable, hungry for her inheritance.
The start-up founder, out of money, and out of time.
The young dive instructor, in way over his head and struggling to stay afloat.
The husband, blinded by desire, in all the wrong ways.
And the lover, hidden in the shadows, where no one can see them....

One person's holiday of a lifetime is about to be the last they'll ever have.

Fleeing Melbourne for a village in the Yorkshire Dales had felt right. Sanctuary, I’d thought.

But nowhere is as straightforward as it first appears.

When Giselle flees to the north Yorkshire village of Hollydale, she doesn’t give much thought to what she might find there. She's more concerned with what she's leaving behind – a toxic marriage, the loss of her beloved sister, Lina, and the cloud of suspicion over the circumstances of Lina's death.

But in this small community she makes new and fascinating friends, chief among them Margaret, a wealthy elderly local who lives in Chatswood Hall, the mansion perched on a hill above the village, and Tom, the local handyman. Giselle hopes to start life over, but the past cannot be outrun and her husband will not be cut loose, threatening to arrive on in Hollydale at any moment.

When a bomb explodes on the one road that leads to her cottage, Giselle realises that her Hollydale life is larger and more complicated than she’d understood.

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. Unhappy with the pace of the police investigation, Harlow launches her own search, enlisting her sister Blaise’s reluctant help.

As Harlow struggles to uncover what happened to her father, she’s forced to question everyone and everything around her – including herself. 

When Detective Dawn Grave escaped the tragedy of her youth, she left everything behind. Including her brother’s unsolved murder.

After twenty years, Dawn is back in the remote Australian town where her nightmares all began. But this time, she’s not a victim. She’s a cop on a mission to find her brother’s killer.

Until a local woman is found brutally murdered.

Dawn is forced to focus on the current case and quickly realises there are dozens of possible suspects—including the victim’s best friend. But when the friend is found dead, her body dumped in plain sight… The case becomes a race.

Find the motive. Find the killer. Before they strike again.

Someone is stalking gold hunters. Now a bushman is stalking them . . .

Terry Drage is not the first amateur gold prospector to rock up to the Murchison Hotel, brag about an exciting discovery - and then vanish into thin air. But Gabe Ahern is determined he will be the last.

No one knows the land around the remote Western Australian town of Cue better than Gabe - a wild dog trapper who's in his element in the bush. Feeling responsible for his friend's fate, he races there to join the search.

But it won't be an easy ride. For a start the local cops seem sure Terry going missing is nothing more than a tragic accident. It's down to Gabe to spot the sinister pattern of disappearances and deaths in recent years.

Plus, the last time Gabe was in his old home town it was under the very worst of circumstances. And now, to stop a killer, he'll need to confront the ghosts from his past . . .

Detective Superintendent Jack Hawksworth is seconded by counter-terrorism to investigate a spate of domestic events. First it was needles in strawberries, then tampering with lipstick samplers and baby formula. But when toxic mushrooms enter the market system and a death occurs, a wave of terror is set to sweep the country. Breaking news of a possible serial killer only heightens the alarm.

There are no leads, no DNA, no witnesses, no CCTV footage. Jack and his team must work on instinct to figure out why someone would want to harm innocent victims, each of them curiously linked to a single blood transfusion. 

When a hospital bomb threat erupts, it is up to the team to prevent the inevitable bloodshed. The clock is ticking, and no one is safe from the possibility of a tragedy on a catastrophic scale.

A group of old friends. A grieving mother. A lying bride.

Adele and Jason are childhood sweethearts. Their wedding day on the sunny Australian coast is a chance to reunite and celebrate with friends and family.

But Adele isn't telling the truth about her relationship. And some of the bridal party – still reeling from a tragic death in the group a decade before – hold secrets of their own.

What happened on the jetty all those years ago was an accident, everyone agrees.

Or do they?

After posting a drunken rant that goes horrifically viral, Bronte needs a place to lie low. Jobless, friendless, broke, she volunteers as a carer on an isolated rural property. She won’t be paid for looking after dementia sufferer Nell, but at least she’ll have a place to stay. Bronte’s host is Nell’s daughter Veda, who runs spiritual rebirthing retreats. She also claims the rights of a sovereign citizen and rejects the authority of the state, refusing even to register her car. She has acquired a small but devoted following of the like-minded.

Are they harmless cranks, with their conspiracy theories and outrage at government overreach? Or dangerously paranoid domestic terrorists? And what is the dark secret that Nell, in her confused state, keeps harking back to? Bronte, increasingly uneasy, would be getting far away from the whole place—if she had anywhere else to go.

When nineteen-year-old farmgirl Adelaide Hoffman applies for a cadetship at the Gunnawah Gazette, she sees it as her ticket out of a life too small for her. The paper's owner, Valdene Bullark, seeing something of the girl she once was in young Adelaide, puts her straight to work.

What starts as a routine assignment covering an irrigation project soon puts Adelaide on the trail of a much bigger story. Water is money in farming communities, and when Adelaide starts asking questions, it's like she's poked a bull ant's nest. Someone will do whatever it takes to stop Adelaide and Val finding out how far the river of corruption and crime runs.

Shady deals. Vested interests. A labyrinth of lies. It seems everyone in Gunnawah has a secret to keep. And too many are already dead quiet.

One night in the woods 
A party gone wrong 
A body discovered at sunrise

He murdered her at the folly on their wedding day, left her body for the crows. They say she haunts the woods now, a girl in a white dress …
 
Everyone in the small town of Thorncombe knows the tales of the haunted woods where the birds don’t sing and a girl in a white dress roams, luring people to their deaths. But when a girl in white is found dead the morning after Halloween, her body carefully arranged at the bottom of an old stone folly, the community is thrown into turmoil.
 
With a teenage daughter of his own, police detective Ben Chase knows how high the stakes are. Was the girl the victim of a party prank gone wrong, or does her death represent something more sinister and ritualistic?

As the investigation unfolds and the noose tightens around Chase’s own family, the only thing anyone can be sure of is that no one is safe until this violent killer is caught.