The Dry by Jane Harper
The town of Kiewarra, somewhere in rural south-eastern Australia, is a community on the brink. A drought is making life extremely difficult for the locals. So nobody is really surprised when farmer Luke Hadler is found with a self-inflicted shotgun wound, his wife and eldest son…
NTN: Bullet Gal
Written by Andrez Bergen — Mitzi (surname unknown) is a character who won’t die. She appears throughout Andrez Bergen’s oeuvre, which stretches across genres and forms, with influences from high-tech sci-fi and classic crime noir worn prominently on the sleeve. His graphic novels, short stories…
NTN: All These Perfect Strangers by Aoife Clifford
Penelope Sheppard (Pen for short) is like almost any other teenager in small-town Australia in the early 1990s. She longs to escape, to break out from the confines of rural life. The chance comes in the form of a bursary allowing her to study law…
Gunshine State by Andrew Nette
“Beautiful one day, perfect the next.” That’s how Queensland, Australia’s advertising campaign Sunshine State describes the weather in the country’s second largest state. The beaches and pristine waters from Coolangatta in the south to Cape York in the far north attract tourists from all over the…
NTN: Four Days by Iain Ryan
Brisbane, Queensland in the 1980s. If this Australian sunshine state isn’t the most corrupt place in the Southern Hemisphere, then the Pope isn’t a Catholic, and the only thing bears do in the woods is have picnics. That’s how this punchy debut by Iain Ryan…
CIS: June Wright, Australia's queen of crime
“Our very own Agatha Christie,” claims a quote from the Sydney Morning Herald on the cover of June Wright’s Duck Season Death, written in 1955 but only just published. In post-war Australia, June Wright’s mystery novels famously outsold even Christie’s, and yet by Wright’s death…
Interview: Kat Clay
Australia’s Crime Factory has been on our radar for some time. Known for producing a quality fiction magazine, more recently the company’s series of indie novellas have really caught our attention. In the past we’ve reviewed both Freight by Ed Kurtz and Saint Homicide by Jake Hinkson,…