From “outback noir” to gritty urban thrillers, the range of Australian crime fiction books is as diverse as the landscape of the country itself. Here are seventeen contemporary Australian crime fiction books that will give you a taste of all the ways you can break the law Down Under.
The Dry by Jane Harper
The Dry is set in Kiewarra, a fictional town five hours’ drive from Melbourne. It’s an El Niño summer, and severe drought has hit the town hard. A farmer, Luke Hadler, shoots his wife and son in cold blood, before turning the gun on himself – or so it seems. Most of the townspeople are happy to assume that it was the last desperate act of a depressed man driven to the brink, but Luke’s parents think something more sinister might be afoot. That’s when Aaron Falk, a financial crimes cop from the big smoke, comes to town and finds himself reeled in. Read my full review of The Dry here.
Bonus: One of Jane Harper’s latest novels, Last One Out, is also set in a small Australian town but instead focuses on a historical missing persons case. Read my full review here.
Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson
The conceit of Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone unfolds much as the title suggests. Everyone in Ernie’s family has killed someone: his brother, his father, his step-sister, the lot. One by one, Ernie reveals how each family member was culpable in someone’s death, as he tries to figure out which one of them is responsible for the most recent murder – a man none of them appear to know, who simply showed up dead outside the ski chalet where they’re hosting a family reunion (yes, Australia has ski chalets!). Read my full review of Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone here.
Kill Your Husbands by Jack Heath
Kill Your Husbands is a locked-room mystery set over the course of a weekend getaway. Three couples rent an isolated house on a mountaintop, to spend some time reconnecting and relaxing in nature. Things get spicy when the idea of partner-swapping comes up. The friends concoct a convoluted scheme where, for one night only, they’ll sleep with someone who isn’t their spouse. What could go wrong? Well, one of the husbands turning up dead, for one. And then another. And one of the wives goes missing. Read my full review of Kill Your Husbands here.
To The River by Vikki Wakefield
To The River begins with a convenient coincidence – a recently-divorced, newly-redundant journalist finds herself living next door to the last remaining family member of an accused murderer on the run. Rachel thinks that publishing the truth of what happened the night of the ‘Caravan Murders’, and the perpetrator’s daring escape, will revive her career and re-start her life. Sabine, her subject, has her own reasons for finally coming out of the shadows to share her story. Their motives will collide, and the truth will be revealed – and it won’t be what anyone expects. Read my full review of To The River here.
Panic by Catherine Jinks
The main character of Panic is desperate to retreat from the world after a video of her drunken rant about her ex-boyfriend goes viral, so a volunteer position on a remote New South Wales estate caring for an elderly woman seems ideal. Only, once she arrives, she realises she’s signed up for way more than she bargained for. The elderly woman’s daughter is a conspiracy theorist of the sovereign citizen sub-type, and hidden away in the house are rifles, panic rooms, and enough canned food to keep them going for far longer than she intends to stay. But will she have a choice? Read my full review of Panic here.
Like, Follow, Die by Ashley Kalagian Blunt
Like, Follow, Die starts in 2025, with Corinne as “the most hated woman in Australia”. A brand new homicide detective with a lot to prove has shown up on her doorstep and asked her to tell him her side of the story. Her story unfolds alongside that of her son Ben, a young man whose diaries have been entered into police evidence. The entries trace his descent into misogynistic extremism, a conflation of life circumstances that leads him to believe feminism is the cause of all his problems – and eventually, he is driven to act, with devastating consequences. Read my full review of Like, Follow, Die here.
Pheasants Nest by Louise Milligan
Pheasants Nest is “a stunning and surprising thriller” about a journalist who is kidnapped, and finds herself living out the worst-case-scenarios she reports on the news. Australian journalist Louise Milligan gets the ‘small town’ feel of Australia exactly right. Everyone knows someone who knows someone, and in this story it feels very natural and relatable, rather than conveniently coincidental or contrived. Read my full review of Pheasants Nest here.
Bonus: The story of the main character continues in Milligan’s brand new novel, Shellybanks. Read my full review here.
Lowbridge by Lucy Campbell
How can a teenage girl go missing, in a small town where everyone knows everyone? How can her whereabouts remain unknown, decades later, in a small town where no one can have any secrets? These are the questions that fuel Lowbridge, where a woman, consumed by grief after the loss of her own daughter, moves to her husband’s regional hometown. She joins the local historical society and unfortunately, the answers she finds only lead to more questions. Read my full review of Lowbridge here.
It Takes A Town by Aoife Clifford
You’ve heard that it takes a village to raise a kid – but did you know that it takes a town to solve a murder? That’s the idea at the heart of It Takes A Town. Vanessa Walton was the shining star of her hometown of Welcome. When she’s found dead at the bottom of the stairs in her home, her funeral is one of the best-attended in living memory. And yet, she rubbed plenty of people in Welcome the wrong way – that might be why she was receiving threatening letters before she died. Was her death really an accident, or was it something more nefarious? Read my full review of It Takes A Town here.
How To Kill A Client by Joanna Jenkins
Australia isn’t all small town murders and outback disappearances. How To Kill A Client is set largely in the sparkling high-rises of Brisbane’s CBD, where recent murder victim Gavin Jones did his best (worst) work. As an in-house lawyer who controlled millions of dollars per year, he was legal firm Howard Greene’s biggest client – and he was also a huge arsehole, especially to the women in his life. No one liked Gavin, and everyone was victimised by his cruelty – but who took the drastic step of ending his life?
Bonus: In her later novel, The Bluff, one of the central characters starts working locum in a small town and finds herself embroiled in the connected cases of a missing teenager and a dead farmer. Read my full review here.
The Creeper by Margaret Hickey
If you want to read a murder mystery/thriller set in regional Australia, you could hardly be in better hands than Margaret Hickey’s. The award-winning author did her PhD on depictions of landscape in Australian literature, so she’s got it down cold (or hot, as the case may be). The Creeper is a “pitch perfect outback noir” novel, with a particularly interesting perspective on policing in a small town. Read my full review of The Creeper here.
The Neighbours by Emma Babbington
One of your close neighbours turning up dead – murdered, in fact – is stressful enough. What if you had reason to suspect that someone in your family was the perpetrator? That’s the conceit of The Neighbours, an Australian suburban murder mystery. The characters are intriguing and withholding, and you go from wondering who would want to murder a charismatic plastic surgeon to wondering who wouldn’t want to bonk him on the head. Read my full review of The Neighbours here.
All That’s Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien
When All That’s Left Unsaid begins, it’s 1996 and Ky is returning to her family home in Sydney’s south west. She has been living in Melbourne, working as a journalist, for years – and yet, it’s like she never left. Except that her brother is dead. There were a dozen witnesses to 17-year-old Denny Tran’s murder in Cabramatta’s Lucky 8 restaurant, but none of them saw anything. She’s frustrated by the lack of answers from police about what happened the night of Denny’s death, so she begins investigating for herself. Read my full review of All That’s Left Unsaid here.
Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane
Rather than taking the reader through a series of events climaxing with the capture and conviction of an Australian highway serial killer, Highway 13 tells a collection of interconnected stories about the impact of the crimes. The timeline stretches back to the 1950s, with characters forced to revise their histories in light of the new context, and forward to 2028, where the ripples are still rolling out thirty years after the event. Read my full review of Highway 13 here.
A Routine Infidelity by Elizabeth Coleman
Set in Melbourne, A Routine Infidelity follows Ted, a prickly private detective with “intimacy issues”. She mostly tails cheating spouses and serves court documents, but she’s eager to grow her business into something more. Things heat up when one of her subjects turns out to be embezzling millions from his business partner – only his flinty wife seems to be more concerned about the girlfriend he has on the side. Ted just wants to make sure that her detective work gets due credit when the police finally nab him, but that might mean putting herself in danger to get the job done. Read my full review of A Routine Infidelity here.
Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty
As Big Little Lies unfolds, each chapter is punctuated with extracts from witness interviews with a journalist – something went down at a North Sydney school trivia night, and one of the characters present is responsible. Everyone was drunk, everyone was dealing with a lifetime’s worth of baggage, and everyone had good reason (well, good-ish) to want someone at the Pirriwee Public Trivia Night fundraiser dead. Read my full review of Big Little Lies here.
Bonus: No bookshelf of contemporary Australian crime writing is complete without Liane Moriarty. There’s plenty more to enjoy in her backlist, including Apples Never Fall (read my full review here) and The Husband’s Secret (read my full review here).
The Cry by Helen Fitzgerald
The premise of The Cry – a baby goes missing on a lonely roadside in Australia, creating a worldwide media frenzy and ratcheting up tensions in a fragile marriage – evokes Madeline McCann, for the tender age of the child and the worldwide scrutiny of the parents in the case, but also Azaria Chamberlain for its Australian setting. It’s a modern take on the missing child, told in the style of Liane Moriarty and Gillian Flynn (if you’re fans of their books, you definitely want to pick this one up). Read my full review of The Cry here.
Leave a Reply