Penguin Books Australia

'So far I had known just where I stood on the Wolf-Wynant-Jorgensen troubles and what I was doing – the answers were, respectively, nowhere and nothing . . . when I opened my eyes and sat up in bed some six hours later Nora was shaking me and a man with a gun in his hand was standing in the bedroom doorway.'

'Dick became convinced that Perry was that rarity, 'a natural killer'- absolutely sane, but conscienceless, and capable of dealing, with or without motive, the coldest-blooded deathblows'

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, a wealthy farmer, his wife and their two young children were found brutally murdered. Blood all over the walls, the telephone lines cut, and only a few dollars...

Ex-Policeman Bernie Günther thought he¹d seen everything on the streets of 1930¹s Berlin. But then he went freelance, and each case he tackled sucked him further into the grisly excesses of Nazi sub-culture. And even after the war, amidst the decayed, imperial splendour of Vienna, Bernie uncovered a legacy that made the wartime atrocities look lily-white in comparison . . .

'Exceptionally...

They came for me, just like I knew they would. Luke had been dead for just three days.

Rose Wilks' life is shattered when her newborn baby Joel is admitted to intensive care.

Emma Hatcher has all that Rose lacks. Beauty. A loving husband. A healthy son. Until tragedy strikes and Rose is the only suspect.

Hal Challis is in trouble at home and abroad: carpeted by the boss for speaking out about police budget cuts; missing his lover, Ellen Destry, who is overseas on a study tour.

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...

Victor Radcliffe, prominent Melbourne businessman, on the committee of the Carlton Football Club, lies murdered in a deserted warehouse—the bayonet wound suggests a trained killer, but Police Inspector James Maclaine, and his smart-talking sidekick Harry Devlin, are having trouble tracking down the killer.

Winner, Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award 1999

The villain was in custody as they say, but villains were coming out of the woodwork and the past was sending out tentacles which were winding around the necks of people living and dying in the present. It's a dying trade I'm in.

Meet Cliff Hardy. Smoker, drinker, ex-boxer. And private investigator.

I looked up. The rope was tied to a rolled steel joist about two metres above the truck cab. Ned had climbed up on to the cab roof, tied the rope to the joist, slid it along. Tied a slipknot around his neck. And stepped off the cab roof.

Peter Temple is one of the world's great crime writers. In this enthralling novel, he tells the story of a man who has left a dangerous job to make a new life in the...

'Well,' said Mr Gorby, addressing his reflection in the looking glass, 'I've been finding out things these last twenty years, but this is a puzzler and no mistake.'

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab is the original blockbuster crime novel. Set in the marvellous Melbourne of the late nineteenth century it tells a devilishly tricky tale.

www.textclassics.com.au

My heart pumped hard and fast, fed by the jitter of adrenaline coursing through my veins. This was getting beyond a joke…Don't you just hate it when somebody tries to kill you and you don't know who or why?

There's a corpse in the freezer at Pacific Pastoral meat-packing works in Melbourne's outer suburbs. Trust Murray Whelan—minder, fixer and general dogsbody for the Minister for Industry—to...

'Alan Carter takes us into the dark underside of the mining boom in an atmospheric and sharply written thriller.'
- The Saturday Age

The world is in economic meltdown but a mining town of Hopetoun, Western Australia, is booming.

With the town's population exploding, it's easy enough to hide a crime – and a dirty past.

Disgraced police-service golden boy DSC Cato Kwong is doing time investigating...

Lee, a petty criminal, wakes in a seedy motel with a bullet in his side and a suitcase of stolen money, his memory hazy as to how he got there.  Soon he meets Wild, a doctor who is escaping his own disastrous life, and the two men set out for the safety of the countryside.

'Sassy, Slick, and deliciously entertaining: all the snap and verve of classic noir, delivered with a smart modern twist.'
P.M. NEWTON

'With charm and attitude to burn, Jack Susko is your ideal guide through a dangerous world of violence and double-dealing.'
CHARLES ARDAI, HARD CASE CRIME

For once, Jack Susko is feeling pretty good: his secondhand bookshop is on the up, and the cops haven't been around...

Meet Jack Irish, criminal lawyer, debt collector, football lover, turf watcher, trainee cabinetmaker, and one of the best crime characters ever created. 

Black Tide is the second of Peter Temple's Jack Irish thrillers and was first published in 1999.

Jack Irish—lawyer, gambler, part-time cabinetmaker, finder of missing people—is recovering from a foray into the criminal underworld when he agrees to look for the son of an old workmate of his father's.

On a winter trip home to the island of Domarö, Anders and Cecilia take their six-year-old daughter Maja across the ice to visit the lighthouse at Gåvasten.

And Maja disappears. Leaving not even a footprint in the snow.

Two years later, alone and more or less permanently drunk, Anders returns to Domarö to confront his despair. He slowly realises that Maja's disappearance is not the first...

Dr. Jennifer White's life-long friend Amanda is dead—murdered. Four of her fingers were surgically removed after death, and Dr. White is the main suspect. But she doesn't know if she did it.