Australian and New Zealand crime and thriller writing - collectively referred to as Southern Cross Crime - is booming globally, with antipodean authors regularly featuring on awards and bestseller lists, such as Eleanor Catton's Booker Prize winning The Luminaries and Jane Harper's big commercial hit, The Dry, winner of the CWA Gold Dagger Award. Hailing from two sparsely populated nations on the far edge of the former Empire - neighbours that are siblings in spirit, vastly different in landscape - Australian and New Zealand crime writers offer readers a blend of exotic and familiar, seasoned by distinctive senses of place, outlook, and humour, and roots that trace to the earliest days of our genre. Southern Cross Crime is the first comprehensive guide to modern crime writing from "Down Under". From coastal cities to the outback, leading critic Craig Sisterson showcases key titles from over 250 storytellers, plus screen dramas ranging from Mystery Road to Top of the Lake. Fascinating insights are added through in-depth interviews with some of the prime suspects who paved the way or instigated the global boom, including Michael Robotham, Paul Cleave, Emma Viskic, Paul Thomas, Candice Fox, and Garry Disher. 'Southern Cross Crime is informative, knowledgeable, wide ranging. If you have any ideas about writing a crime novel you need to read it, if you enjoy reading crime novels, you need to read it, if you simply love reading, you need to read it. This is not a dry as dust tome - the writer's encyclopaedic knowledge is carried lightly... a box of the finest literary chocolates' - Renée Taylor, 2018 recipient of the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction 'A valuable and illuminative resource for crime fiction fans everywhere' - Book'd Out

Australian and New Zealand crime and thriller writing is booming globally, with antipodean authors regularly featuring on awards and bestseller lists across Europe and North America, and readers and publishers looking more and more to tales from lands Down Under. Hailing from two sparsely populated nations on the far edge of the former Empire--neighbors that are siblings in spirit, vastly different in landscape--Australian and New Zealand crime writers offer readers a blend of exotic and familiar, seasoned by distinctive senses of place, outlook, and humor, and roots that trace to the earliest days of our genre. This is the first comprehensive guide to modern Australian and New Zealand crime writing. From coastal cities to the Outback, leading critic Craig Sisterson showcases key titles from more than 200 storytellers, plus screen dramas ranging from Mystery Road to Top of the Lake. Fascinating insights are added through in-depth interviews with some of the prime suspects who paved the way or instigated the global boom, including Jane Harper, Michael Robotham, Paul Cleave, Emma Viskic, Paul Thomas, and Candice Fox.

Patricia Cornwell has a sixth sense about the men and women in blue. In Hornet's Nest, her page-turning novel about crime and police in Charlotte, North Carolina, Cornwell moved behind the badges of these real-life heroes to uncover flesh-and-blood characters who strode through her pages to reveal vulnerable, passionate, brave, sometimes doubting, always fascinating figures. In Southern Cross, Cornwell takes us even closer to the personal and professional lives of big-city police, in a story of corruption, scandal, and robberies that escalate to murder. This time, her setting is Richmond, Virginia, where Charlotte Police Chief Judy Hammer has been brought by an NIJ grant to clean up the police force. Reeling from the recent death of her husband, and resented by the police force, city manager, and mayor of Richmond, Hammer is joined by her deputy chief Virginia West and rookie Andy Brazil on the most difficult assignment of her career. In the face of overwhelming public scrutiny, the trio must bring truth, order, and sanity to a city in trouble.

Police chief Judy Hammer and her team--Virginia West and Andy Brazil--move to Richmond, Virginia, on a one-year assignment to reorganize the police department. Besides resistance to change, Hammer encounters city politics, inner-city problems, and some strange southern criminals. Strong language.

For fans of Cormac McCarthy, Phillip Meyer, Fargo, and Justified, a gritty rural noir thriller about family, drugs, and the legacy of violence. In an isolated town on the coast of southern Australia, Vernon Moore and his wife, Penelope, live in retirement, haunted by an unspeakable act of violence that sent their son, Caleb, to serve time in prison and has driven the couple apart. Ashamed, they refuse to talk about him or visit, but when a close friend warns Vernon that Caleb has been savagely beaten, he has no choice but to act to protect their only child. The perpetrator of the beating is a local thug from a crime family whose patriarch holds sway over the town, with the police in his pay. Everyone knows they trade in drugs. When Vernon maneuvers to negotiate a deal with the father, he makes a critical error. His mistake unleashes a cycle of violence that escalates to engulf the whole town, taking lives with it, revealing what has been hiding in plain sight in this picturesque rural community and threatening to overtake his son. Told from shifting perspectives at a sprint, in language that sometimes approaches the simple profundity of parable, this gritty debut was hailed on its Australian publication as “a darkly illuminating thriller that soars across genre constraints . . . [and] engages with pressing contemporary issues while exploring timeless questions. Hobson writes as if his life depends on it” (The Australian).

In the late 1930s, Jim Crow walked unopposed in Mississippi, and Europe was preparing for war. But even though an ocean apart, the threads of hate and fear bound them together. Set in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Where Southern Cross the Dog begins with the tragic slaying of a day laborer and the chance meeting of its two main characters: Travis Montgomery, a new graduate of Millsaps College, and Hannah Morgan, a young, educated, affluent African-American woman who returns to the South to assist her ailing grandmother. As their initial wariness turns to friendship and then romance, Travis and Hannah unravel the secrets behind the murder which include a conspiracy that runs from Clarksdale to pre-war Europe.

Single-mother Fran returns to her sleepy hometown to care for her dying father when a devastating bush fire breaks out. A heartbreaking, nail-biting disaster-noir thriller from the bestselling author of The Cry and Worst Case Scenario. 'Urgent, angry, absolutely terrifying, yet suffused with the humanity and humour you expect from a Helen Fitzgerald novel' Erin Kelly, author of Watch Her Fall 'Tantalisingly powerful' The Times ' Ash Mountain is the author at her masterly best ... I loved it!' Louise Candlish, author of The Heights ________________ Fran hates her hometown, and she thought she'd escaped. But her father is ill, and needs care. Her relationship is over, and she hates her dead-end job in the city, anyway. She returns home to nurse her dying father, her distant teenage daughter in tow for the weekends. There, in the sleepy town of Ash Mountain, childhood memories prick at her fragile self-esteem, she falls in love for the first time, and her demanding dad tests her patience, all in the unbearable heat of an Australian summer. As past friendships and rivalries are renewed, and new ones forged, Fran's tumultuous home life is the least of her worries, when old crimes rear their heads and a devastating bushfire ravages the town and all of its inhabitants... Simultaneously a warm, darkly funny portrait of small-town life – and a woman and a land in crisis – and a shocking and truly distressing account of a catastrophic event that changes things forever, Ash Mountain is a heart-breaking slice of domestic noir, and a disturbing disaster thriller that you will never forget... ________________ 'A new novel from Helen Fitzgerald is always a major event, and Ash Mountain is magnificent' Mark Billingham, author of Rabbit Hole 'There is plenty of human depravity in the plot but none of that is as terrifyingly overmastering as the fire' Literary Review 'Domestic life is rarely served up quite so dark as this – but that only makes you hungry for more' The Sun 'Dark, atmospheric and terrifying' Ambrose Parry, author of A Corruption of Blood 'Compelling' Independent Praise for Helen FitzGerald ***Worst Case Scenario was Shortlisted for the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2020*** 'The plotting is intricate and beautifully handled, and the narrative pace is absolutely breakneck ... a wonderful, energetic, hard-hitting and deeply funny novel' The Big Issue 'The main character is one of the most extraordinary you'll meet between the pages of a book' Ian Rankin, author of A Song for the Dark times 'A dark, comic masterpiece which manages to be both excruciatingly tense and laugh out loud funny at the same time' Mark Edwards, author of The House Guest 'The classic thriller gets a hell of a twist' Heat 'FitzGerald writes like a more focused Irvine Welsh or a less misogynist Philip Roth' Daily Telegraph 'Domestic life is rarely served up quite so dark as this – but that only makes you hungry for more' The Sun