Bücher veröffentlicht von Clan Destine Press

Thirty years of silver blades, scarlet stains and the most elegant of heels.Thirty years of slipping in the knife, tightening the noose, measuring out the poison.Thirty years of whispered threats and tangled plots, of murder and mayhem.For thirty years, the annual Scarlet Stiletto women's crime and mystery short story competition - run by Sisters in Crime Australia - has uncovered dreadful deeds, righteous revenge, deadly high-jinks and wicked shenanigans, all while shining a light on the emerging and seasoned talent of Australian women who've taken to a life writing crime.Celebrate this great competition's 30th anniversary with the gorgeous pearls that are the Scarlet Stiletto's First Prize winners, from 1994 to 2023, and discover why it's criminal what a girl has to do, to get a good read.The winning perpetrators are: Cate Kennedy, Christina Lee, Siobhan Mullany, Janis Spehr, Josephine Pennicott, Roxxy Bent, Jacqui Horwood, Liz Filleul, Julie Waight, Aoiffe Clifford, Evelyn Tsitas, Amanda Wrangles, Ellie Marney, Angela Savage, Candice Graham, Judith Bridge, TJ Hamilton, Ruth Wykes, Rowena Harding-Smith, Philomena Horsley, Blanche Clark, Jessica Southern Reid, Hayley Young, Fin J. Ross, and Romany Rzechowicz.Crime and mystery short stories of startling originality; and a grim warning of what evil lurks in Australian suburbia.- Kerry Greenwood, Sponsor of the Malice Domestic Award

Martin Carter is having a crook day. His home life's a misery, he's been retrenched by the bank and everyone's forgotten his birthday. But a million-dollar payroll, a pistol in a biscuit tin, and a split-second decision change everything.Hurtling north on a motorcycle with the intriguing Faith, Martin encounters a mysterious hit-man, a new-age bikie gang, a reclusive media mogul and the booby-trapped mountain hideout of an old schoolmate.With Faith's help he learns about love again, along with some bitter truths about instant coffee, brown suede shoes, and the legendary Great Aussie Truck Stop Breakfast.

Rising Tiger features 65 mystery stories from young writers living in the Huon Valley, Tasmania, and beyond.Each year, the Terror Australis Readers and Writers Festival in the Huon Valley offers a Mystery Short Story Competition for young writers to age 16.Entries arrive from across Tasmania, every state in Australia, and from as far afield as New Zealand, and Georgia (the country).The young writers' stories are entertaining, twisty and fun. They make life rather difficult for the judges.This book contains the winning stories from 2019 to 2022, along with a range of other stories selected by the competition's convenor, Dr L J M Owen.The themes of the stories from these years were:2019 - Female Bushrangers2020 - Female Detectives2021 - Scene of the Crime2022 - Agatha Christie in Tasmania

'The Diemen Alexander is Jurassic Park meets ET in the best possible way. It's fast paced, thrilling, funny and fantastical. I loved it.' - Alison GoodmanWhen tender-hearted geeky teenage Luke rescues a lizard in a thunderstorm on kunanyi, he has no idea it will have a mind of its own.Or eat quite so much. Or grow so fast.Or resemble Tasmania's lost dinosaur.Suddenly Alexander the lizard becomes an immensely valuable object, sought by cold-blooded and violent people.Luke's brains and compassion won't be enough to protect Alexander - something his anarchic sister Gatta could have told him - not even with help from the fearsome Shona, paleogeologist and AFLW Goddess.Meanwhile Alexander - teeth, claws and appetite - is growing, changing and learning to communicate.Can Luke find his own ferocity and ruthlessness to counter the odds stacked against them?A sci-fi romp through present day Hobart - featuring zoology, comparative anatomy and venture capitalism - that asks deeper questions about human responsibility towards animals, the earth and each other, and the truth that power goes to the person most prepared to wield it.The Diemen Alexander is an adventure full of narrow escapes and fail-to-escapes, an XH Holden ute, shameful misuse of really excellent whisky, and a distressing amount of fast food.

People often say 'You don't deserve this' but, when it comes to cancer, who does?So, when a devastating diagnosis tips the Falkiner-Rose family on its head, it takes medicos, bloody-mindedness and imagination to survive their version of medical whack-a-mole.At the time they kept up a stream of Pete Updates for friends and family. Using those and intimate reflections, Leslie Falkiner-Rose tells a tale that's messy, moving, mind-blowing and, at times, very amusing.

Two Melbourne TV journalists are on a well-earned holiday, travelling New Zealand in a motorhome. Will they survive a monster storm and a killer on the loose?Kim Prescott survived a killer's bullet in Melbourne but can't shake the PTSD. For Jo Trescowthick the trip is a chance to confront family demons. The third in the Melbourne Spotlight series finds Kim and Jo on a road trip from Auckland on the north island to the tourist mecca of Queenstown in the deep south; Rotorua mud pools, Kaik¿ura whale watching, the stunning Marlborough Sounds. They won't make it.Debt-ridden South Island fisherman and ex-con Gordie Tulloch is offered the deal of a lifetime. Is it legal? He doesn't care. All he has to do is survive the storm approaching the Shaky Isles. But Gordie's every move is under scrutiny by a man whose own secrete are about to spill into public view.And then of course Mother Nature has her own agenda. Cyclone Gita is on a serpentine path of destruction through the tropics that will see her smash into New Zealand.The cyclone, the motorhome, the fisherman, and the watcher all face an unexpected rendezvous in Kaik¿ura.

In the frosty Melbourne winter, milliner sleuth Catherine Kint looks for distraction in a night at the circus.When tragedy strikes, she and her barman Boris are drawn into a new mystery.As they draw back the metaphorical curtain, they're confronted with a troupe in chaos, a culture of secrecy, and a family in crisis.Add in hula hooping thugs, a desperate suspect, and a nihilistic bully and you have a recipe for carnage even Catherine can't control.Oh, and then there's Boris' love life - send in the clowns...

Blind barrister Tom Challinor's plans for a well-earned week off are dashed by an attempted murder linked to a Sydney escort agency.Sonya and her sassy friend Avril are workers in that niche-market agency where the workers are all people with disability, amputees, chair users, or people of short stature. Their eager customers style themselves 'devotees'.Meanwhile, bizarrely-mutilated dolls are turning up on the doorestep of a women's refuge.As Tom investigates an underworld of desire, entitlement, and exploitation the menace of predatory passion clamps tight around Avril and Sonya, and young women start to disappear.

Quiet, unassuming Meg Thorne is practically invisible. But this retired philosophy professor has plenty of opinions - like, why do people dismiss little old ladies as harmless?Meg and her two friends, the tough-as-nails Dorothy Arden and the boisterous Lila Gatti, have decided to be a Force for Good with their Grey Ghosts Agency: because little old ladies can go undercover where other detectives can't.Their new case is the infiltration of Sunnyvale Residential and Care Home to learn why their client's mother, Sara, is suddenly so afraid but won't talk. It's Meg's job to check into Sunnyvale for 'a short rest' and uncover the truth.Meg will have to confront her own fears of ageing while also investigating why Sara's friend Jenny is being held in isolation, why an old enemy is popping up, what one of the other residents knows about the fate of Lila Gatti's disabled son, and whether the other residents are truly prepared for Meg's timely lecture on philosophy and responsibility.Dangers lurk in Sunnyvale, but nobody counted on an unfolding global pandemic being one of them.Will Meg be able to leave with the truth, or will she be trapped in a lockdown with those who mean her harm?

Mike Crowe doesn't believe in ghosts, but it seems there's one ghost that believes in him. Can he escape the attention of a psychopath long enough to help her?A not-exactly legal PI, Crowe is blackmailed into tracking down a serial killer known as The Scavenger. At the same time, he finds himself increasingly plagued by visions - and eventually visitations - of a young girl he failed to save from being murdered a decade before.Are these things connected?Crowe must scavenge through the debris of a world going to pieces around him - at first just to survive and then to find the answers to questions he'd rather hadn't been asked. 'Scavengers is smart, dark, riveting crime fiction at its best. This is Hood at the top of his game.' - Kaaron Warren, author of The Grief Hole, Into Bones Like Oil, and Tide of Stone.

One spring morning a woman is found dead in a Brunswick alley adorned with symbols of the occult.Catherine Kint, milliner, gin enthusiast and raconteur, has no reason to be involved until her friend is under investigation.Armed with a sharp wit, a crime scene background and a barman named Boris, Catherine walks into a world of new age prophecies, curses and money.Honestly, it would drive a girl to drink.

Perth cop Eve Rock is investigating a series of abductions from the seedy inner-city Paradise Nightclub when her boss adds a murder case to her workload. Now, Eve loves a challenge - about as much as she loves red wine, exotic food and cigars - but this case is a bit tricky because she'd speed dated the sleazy salesman hours before he met his Maker. But then 'tricky' is Eve's middle name. Her mum's a former hooker-turned-nun who runs a select girls school. Her daughter's a fanatical 'Virgin Vigilante' who attends that same school. And Eve is being stalked by a department store Santa. If that isn't enough, her love life is dead in the water. Or it is until Eve meets dreamy undercover cop Adam Fox whose sex appeal isn't diminished by his slut heels and micro skirt. And then there's his equally gorgeous dad... Eve's life could be peachy... except now someone wants to kill her. Operation Paradise is the debut crime novel for West Australian writer Sarah Evans and the first in the Eve Rock comic crime series.

A freezer full of body parts is the tip of the criminal iceberg for Perth cop Eve Rock.The festive season has spawned a spate of murders, robberies and abductions, which actually reassures Eve that others' bad habits far exceed her own. It also gives her a watertight excuse to avoid hanging out with her dysfunctional family while spending time with her two gorgeous colleagues and would-be lovers, Quinn Fox and his son Adam. A win-win situation.Butchered bodies used for questionable purposes, a murdered man in a skip, a brazen multi-million dollar haul from a high-end jewellers and posh art gallery are all in a day's work for Eve and her team.Now usually Eve relishes getting stuck into solving crimes, but she's not so keen when she's the target and the boundaries between work and home become nastily blurred.But who is trying to kill her this time? And why? And who are the strange people wandering around her temporary digs late at night? And why is her mum the nun acting more weird than usual?And why is she such a pushover when it comes to the men in her life?All will be revealed - but only if Eve can survive to work everything out.

Book 1 in the Kit O'Malley series. Private investigator Kit O'Malley has had more exciting cases than following a wealthy client's husband, but Celia Robinson is paying big money to find out what the libidinous Geoffrey is up to with a blonde, a redhead and entrepreneur Ian Dalkeith and his group of shady businessmen. Enduring a heatwave and fighting the inanimate objects that are out to get her are the hardest parts of Kit's assignment until a body is found in the Robinson's ornamental fish pond and everything takes a turn for the weird and nasty. While the cops do their own thing, Celia's daughter Quinn hires Kit to find the killer and her mother's missing butler. What Kit doesn't count on is Quinn's determination to be involved in the case. To make matters worse she brings along her lawyer, Alexis Cazenove, who is as stunning as she is smart and has an extremely disconcerting effect on Kit's sense of balance. After a near miss with a homicidal driver, Kit knows she's getting close to something - even if the truth seems to be that everyone has a secret. And then there's the question of just who the mysterious Mike Finnigan is following; is it Geoffrey, Dalkeith or Kit herself?