Showing results by author "Garry Disher" in All Categories

Constable Paul Hirschhausen - "Hirsch" - is a recently demoted detective sent from Adelaide, Australia's southernmost booming metropolis, to Tiverton, a one-road town in rustic, backwater "wool and wheat" country three hours north. Hirsch is more than just a disgraced cop, a rumored whistle-blower - internal investigations is still trying to convict him of something, even if it means planting evidence, and someone has a bullet they'd like to put in his head, as has been made clear by the pistol cartridge left in his mailbox.

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.

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....

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.

Hirsch is checking firearms. The regular police audit: all weapons secured, ammo stored separately, no unauthorised person with keys to the gun safe. He’s checking people, too. The drought is hitting hard in the mid-north, and Hirsch is responsible for the welfare of his scattered flock of battlers, bluebloods, loners and miscreants. He isn’t usually called on for emergency roadside assistance. But with all the other services fully stretched, it’s Hirsch who has to grind his way out beyond the Mischance Creek ruins to where some clueless tourist has run into a ditch.

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....

A young girl has been abducted on Australia's Mornington Peninsula, and Sergeant Ellen Destry takes the case in Inspector Hal Challis' absence.

Garry Disher crafts sharp police procedurals with a distinctive down-under flair.

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.

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 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.

Some people just work better alone. Wyatt’s one of them. He’s been getting by on nice quiet little burglaries - one-man jobs - when he gets wind of something bigger. A corporate crook, notorious Ponzi schemer, set to face court and certain jail time. He’s about to skip bail the old-fashioned way: on a luxury yacht with a million dollars in cash. Wyatt thinks it sounds like something he should get into. He’s not alone.

Wyatt made some powerful enemies in his first three outings, and the time has come to confront them. But we know by now that Wyatt’s revenge won’t be showy, impetuous and futile; it will be pragmatic, elaborate—and still possibly futile. He holes up in Sydney, preparing to return home to Melbourne to play his enemies against each other in a dangerous double-cross that will tear down the notions of loyalty and obligation.

A pair of hit men working a job for a meth kingpin have a very bad day, and the resulting bushfire draws attention to a drug lab and two bodies burned up in a Mercedes. Sergeant Ellen Destry - newly minted head of her department's sex crime unit - and Inspector Hal Challis return in this newest installment of Gary Disher's Peninsula-based crimes series. With meth-related crime on the rise, interdepartmental tensions mount, and Challis soon finds himself fighting to keep control of his case.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Australian jewel thief Wyatt has a bounty of stolen jewels and a yacht, but nothing can stop him from returning to his life of crime. He drugs his lover, police officer Liz Redding, and escapes into the night only to discover the gems he lifted are fakes. With his luck and his resources rapidly running out, Wyatt begrudgingly joins forces with Raymond, his estranged nephew and an established criminal himself, to lift some expensive artwork.

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 the community work - welfare checks and working bees - is starting to pay off. Now Christmas is here and, apart from a grass fire, two boys stealing a ute 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 a strange, vicious incident in Kitchener Street. Suddenly, it doesn’t look like a season of goodwill at all.

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.