Showing results by author "Garry Disher" in All Categories

Hirsch is a whistle-blower. Formerly a promising metropolitan officer, now hated and despised. Exiled to a one-cop station in South Australia’s wheatbelt. Threats. Pistol cartridge in the mailbox. So when he heads up Bitter Wash Road to investigate gunfire and finds himself cut off without backup, there are two possibilities. Either he’s found the fugitive killers thought to be in the area - or his ‘backup’ is about to put a bullet in him. He’s wrong on both counts. But the events that unfold turn out to be a lot more sinister.

The neat suburban homes of the Peninsula seem like an improbable setting for sex parties, blackmail and murder. But when DI Hal Challis is called to investigate the murder of Janine McQuarrie - shot in a deserted country lane in front of her seven-year-old daughter - his progress is hampered by a web of lies and secrets. Everybody has something to hide, something to lose. And someone in Waterloo is determined to kill again.

Wyatt robs banks and payroll vans. Most men like him are dead or in jail, but Wyatt stamps a cold, pitiless style on his heists and has never been caught. Now his funds are low and his luck is running out - until the day Anna Reid explains about the kickback in her partner’s safe. But other players are involved. In Wyatt’s world, there is no yielding, no redemption, and when he’s crossed, the outcome is inevitable.

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.

A small bushfire, but nasty enough for ice cooks to abandon their lab. Fatal, too. But when the bodies in the burnt-out Mercedes prove to be a pair of Sydney hitmen, DI Hal Challis' inquiries into a local ice epidemic take a darker turn. Meanwhile, Ellen Destry, head of the new sex crimes unit, finds herself not only juggling the personalities of her team but hunting a serial rapist who leaves no evidence behind.

Twenty years ago Charlie Deravin's mother went missing near the family beach shack—believed murdered; body never found. His father has lived under a cloud of suspicion ever since. Now Charlie's back living in the shack in Menlo Beach, on disciplinary leave from his job with the police sex-crimes unit, and permanent leave from his marriage. After two decades worrying away at the mystery of his mother's disappearance, he's run out of leads. Then the skeletal remains of two people are found in the excavation of a new building site—and the past comes crashing in on Charlie.

An unidentified man is fished out of the sea with an anchor strapped to his waist. And for DI 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....

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....

This time it’s a payroll and bank run in the north of South Australia, an outpost town suddenly transformed by a pipeline construction project that brings petty crime, prostitution - and opportunity. It’s a town with its own secrets, and Wyatt isn’t quick to trust at the best of times. But he’s on the run, and he can’t afford to be choosy. This is another masterpiece of orchestration and unravelling, anchored by an unforgettable ticking-clock sequence that will keep you listening. Fans of noir and hard-boiled fiction will find a fascinating extension of the genre.

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.

Grace is a thief—a good one. But she's always on the move, always looking over her shoulder, always alone. It's not the life she wants. Then a run-in with an old associate forces her to lie low in a small rural town, where she happens across an antiques shop. The owner Erin is timid but friendly, and has a room to rent. And Grace glimpses a different life, and perhaps a home. But there are dangerous men watching her, and Grace should know better than to let her guard slip. Because no matter how far she runs, her past is always just a few steps behind...

Hirsch's rural beat is wide. Daybreak to day's end, dirt roads and dust. Every problem that besets small towns and isolated properties, from unlicensed driving to arson. In the time of the virus, Hirsch is seeing stresses heightened and social divisions cracking wide open. His own tolerance under strain; people getting close to the edge. Today he's driving an international visitor around: Janne Van Sant, whose backpacker son went missing while the borders were closed. They're checking out his last photo site, his last employer. A feeling that the stories don't quite add up.

Winter in Tiverton, and Constable Paul Hirschhausen has a snowdropper on his patch. Someone is stealing women's underwear, and Hirsch knows how that kind of crime can escalate. Then two calls come in: a child abandoned in a caravan, filthy and starving. And a man on the rampage at the primary school. Hirsch knows how things like that can escalate, too. An absent father who isn't where he's supposed to be; another who flees to the back country armed with a rifle. Families under pressure can break. But it's always a surprise when the killing starts.

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, DI 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.

When hordes of 18-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 DI 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.

After the heists gone wrong in Kickback and Paydirt, Wyatt is further down on his luck and deeper in with the Outfit, a network of organised criminals whose attention he's tried hard to avoid. A risky job in a Brisbane bank and the return of a femme fatale add further complications to Wyatt's increasingly desperate situation and force him to decide who he is and who he cares about.

Wyatt needs a job. A bank job would be nice, or a security van hold-up. As long as he doesn't have to work with cocky idiots and strung-out meth-heads like the Pepper brothers. That's the sort of miscalculation that buys you the wrong kind of time. So he contacts a man who in the past put him on the right kind of heist. And finds himself in Noosa, stealing a painting for Hannah Sten. He knows how it's done: case the premises, set up escape routes and failsafes, get in and get out with the goods unrecognized. Make a good plan; back it up with another. And be very, very careful.

The job's a classic jewel heist: quick, clean and simple. Except for one thing. Wyatt prefers to work alone, but this job belongs to Eddie Oberin and his very smart ex-wife, Lydia. She has the inside information; Wyatt has the planning genius and meticulous preparation. What could possibly go wrong? Plenty. But when you cross Wyatt, you don't walk away.

Wyatt steals $ 50,000 and a sought-after piece of jewelry in a burglary of a politician's house. Wyatt snatches the cash easily enough. He bypasses the alarm system, eludes the cops, makes it safely back to his bolthole in Hobart. It’s the diamond-studded Tiffany brooch—and perhaps the girl—that brings him undone. Now some very hard people want to put Wyatt and that brooch out of circulation. But this is Wyatt's game and Wyatt sets the rules—even if it means a reckoning somewhere far from home.

DI 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’ 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’ patch.