Australian Crime Fiction New Releases 2025

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.

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.