Penguin, Australia, 2026
Cover design Christabella Designs
Cover image Posnov/Getty Images
It seems that magical realism meets a seedy underbelly in the small Australian town of Possible Springs.
Samantha Ross – Possible Springs
Joanna Jenkins – Bad Neighbours
Allen & Unwin, Australia 2026
Cover design Christa Moffitt, Christabella Designs
Cover images Jaroslaw Blaminsky/Trevillion Images; Shutterstock
Commercial litigation lawyer Ruth Dawson is beset both professionally and personally in Bad Neighbours, a twisty tale of greed, property and betrayal.
Joan Sauers – Murder at Thornwood Park
Allen & Unwin, Australia 2026
Cover design Christabella Designs
Cover images Silas Manhood/Trevillion; iStock; Shutterstock
The brooding presence of the now overgrown and dilapidated manor at Thornwood Park is the setting for much of this novel, and a stark metaphor for decay and decline, for the buried past.
Kirsty Manning – Murder in Paris
Allen & Unwin, Australia 2026
Cover design Deborah Parry Graphics
Cover images Elisabeth Ansley/Trevillion Images; Allusioni/iStock; Ekaproeka/Creative Market
With a decided nod to Golden Age detective fiction, Kirsty Manning gives us a female journalist amateur sleuth who works in concert with the metropolitan police in Paris and provincial police as the case widens.
Fiona Hardy – Old Games
Affirm Press, Australia 2026
Cover design Luke Causby/Blue Cork
Cover image Alexwise/Getty Images
Old Games is an interesting mix of slapstick and pathos. The author has given us two female leads who are actually minor criminals engaged in somewhat questionable private detective work. Their activities have an air of larrikinism with undertones of violence.
Sarah Bailey – Click
Allen & Unwin, Australia 2026
Cover design Luke Causby/Blue Cork
Cover images Adobe Stock Images
The setting for Click is 2020 Melbourne, and this is crucial for a number of reasons. It is a time when changes in the delivery of media are accelerating, social media is on the rise and the Dark Web is becoming an increasingly known and troubling entity.
Susan Francis – Revelation Beach
Wild Dingo Press, Australia 2025
Cover design Alex Ross
Revelation Beach is a deeply affecting historical, political and crime fiction set in the dark realities of the 1960s and 1970s in Indonesia and East Timor and the more or less present day of Australia. It is also a story of abandonment, truth and lies, and of love.
James Dunbar – Twisted River
Echo Publishing, Australia 2025
Cover design Debra Billson
Cover images admmgrs/Shutterstock; Frenzel/Shutterstock; Only_up/Shutterstock
The thing about James Dunbar’s Twisted River that makes it so very unnerving is its closeness to the bone of all our contemporary society fears about identity theft. The fear is insidious but also justified.
Michael Burge – Dirt Trap
Midnight Sun Publishing, Australia 2025
Cover design Abby Stout
Dirt Trap takes us back to the rural town of Kippen 20 years after the spate of gay hate murders (deemed at the time to be suicides or unresolved cases) that took the life of James Brandt’s beloved cousin. James is working from home as a piece-work journalist and his husband Dylan Peters is the high school Principal.
Jack Heath – Kill Your Boss
Allen & Unwin, Australia 2025
Cover design Luke Causby/Blue Cork
Cover images Ken Jacobsen/Getty Images; Jemastock/AdobeStock
Jack Heath’s latest crime fiction, Kill Your Boss, begins with the death of head librarian Neville Adams in a small town under the watch of the redoubtable Detective Sergeant Kiara Lui.
Vikki Petraitis – The Stolen
Allen & Unwin, Australia 2025
Cover images Vsl/Adobe Stock; Axel Antas-Bergkvist/Unsplash; Forest Moreland/Unsplash
Cover design Lue Causby/Blue Cork
We are, of course, delighted to see kick-arse Senior Detective Antigone Pollard back on the case in Deception Bay. She does seem a little mellowed, having settled into a comfortable working relationship with her ‘everyone’s Dad’ type colleague Wozza.
Michael Brissenden – Dust
Affirm Press, Australia, 2025
Cover design Luke Causby/Blue Cork
Cover image Creative Images/Adobe Stock
Justice and lawlessness are at the heart of Michael Brissenden’s Dust. In a fast -paced contemporary crime fiction that feels scarily like reality, the author pits his police duo against climate change deniers, cookers, drug and people traffickers, corrupt police and a disaffected rural community.
Tanya Scott – Stillwater
Allen & Unwin, Australia 2025
Cover design Luke Causby/Blue Cork
Cover photographs AdobeStock; Allan Baxter/Getty Images
Tanya Scott’s debut crime fiction is remarkable for its focus on a deep and sympathetic character study of its main character, who is both hero and yet involved from childhood in a life of crime.
Amanda Hampson – The Deadly Dispute
Penguin Random House, Australia 2025
Cover design Debra Billson
Cover images Evgeniya Khudyakova/Shutterstock, goldyg/Shutterstock, WinWin Arts Lab/Shutterstock, ekler/Shutterstock
Tea ladies Hazel Bates and Betty Dewsnap are just the sort of neighbours we’d all like to have with their respective qualities of intelligence and kindness, loyalty and curiosity.
Steve Matthews – Justice in God’s Hands
Big Sky Publishing, Australia 2025
Cover design Think Productions
Steve Matthews is an author who concerns himself with morality, and so, whilst this novel cloaks its philosophising in sleazy criminality, jocular banter and the darkness of humanity, he always invites his reader to consider significant underlying ethical issues.