The Dry
Red Dirt Road
The Stoning
Blood Junction
Opal Country
Deadman’s Creek
The Pit by Peter Papathanasiou
Noir set in OSLO’s interwar years
Five Great Books for Fans of OUTBACK NOIR
13th November 2022
There are more and more titles appearing on the shelves where the Australian Outback itself is a character in the story. The parched backdrop, the beating sun, the paucity of shrubs and trees all add an intensity to the plot. Five great books for fans of Outback Noir.
We have chosen titles that will get your heart racing just a little faster with the tension and get you acquainted with this huge area of terrain. Our first choice is Jane Harper’s The Dry which was one of the first books to coin the hashtag #outbacknoir
The Dry by Jane Harper
Set 500 miles from Melbourne
Amid the worst drought to ravage Australia in a century, it hasn’t rained in small country town Kiewarra for two years. Tensions in the community become unbearable when three members of the Hadler family are brutally murdered. Everyone thinks Luke Hadler, who committed suicide after slaughtering his wife and six-year-old son, is guilty.
Policeman Aaron Falk returns to the town of his youth for the funeral of his childhood best friend, and is unwillingly drawn into the investigation. As questions mount and suspicion spreads through the town, Falk is forced to confront the community that rejected him twenty years earlier. Because Falk and Luke Hadler shared a secret, one which Luke’s death threatens to unearth. And as Falk probes deeper into the killings, secrets from his past and why he left home bubble to the surface as he questions the truth of his friend’s crime.
Red Dirt Road by S R White
In Unamurra, a drought-scarred, one-pub town deep in the outback, two men are savagely murdered a month apart – their bodies elaborately arranged like angels.
With no witnesses, no obvious motives and no apparent connections between the killings, how can lone police officer Detective Dana Russo – flown in from hundreds of kilometres away – possibly solve such a baffling, brutal case?
Met with silence and suspicion from locals who live by their own set of rules, Dana must take over a stalled investigation with only a week to make progress.
But with a murderer hiding in plain sight, and the parched days rapidly passing, Dana is determined to uncover the shocking secrets of this forgotten town – a place where anyone could be a killer.
The Stoning by Peter Papathansiou
A small town in outback Australia wakes to an appalling crime.
A local schoolteacher is found taped to a tree and stoned to death. Suspicion instantly falls on the refugees at the new detention centre on Cobb’s northern outskirts. Tensions are high, between whites and the local indigenous community, between immigrants and the townies.
Still mourning the recent death of his father, Detective Sergeant George Manolis returns to his childhood hometown to investigate. Within minutes of his arrival, it’s clear that Cobb is not the same place he left. Once it thrived, but now it’s a poor and derelict dusthole, with the local police chief it deserves. And as Manolis negotiates his new colleagues’ antagonism, and the simmering anger of a community destroyed by alcohol and drugs, the ghosts of his past begin to flicker to life.
Vivid, pacy and almost dangerously atmospheric, The Stoning is the first in a new series of outback noir featuring DS Manolis, himself an outsider, and a good man in a world gone to hell.
Blood Junction by C J Carver
From CWA Debut Dagger winner….
Journalist India Kane’s trip to the Australian outback takes a horrifying turn when she arrives in the town of Cooinda to find that her best friend Lauren is missing.
Seemingly no one knows what has happened to her, but it’s not long before India finds herself arrested for a double murder that she didn’t commit, caught up in the dark past of a small town hiding a devastating truth – one that could destroy a family, a friendship, and a nation.
Set in the unforgiving landscape of the Australian outback, Blood Junction won the CWA’s Debut Dagger and is CJ Carver’s powerful and compulsive thriller about a woman on the run from a brutal killer, as well as from her own past.
Opal Country by Chris Hammer
In the desolate outback town of Finnigans gap, police struggle to maintain law and order. Thieves pillage opal mines, religious fanatics recruit vulnerable youngsters and billionaires do as they please.
Bodies…
Then an opal miner is found crucified and left to rot down his mine. Nothing about the miner’s death is straight-forward, not even who found the body. Homicide detective Ivan Lucic is sent to investigate, assisted by inexperienced young investigator Nell Buchanan.
But Finnigans Gap has already ended one police career and damaged others, and soon both officers face damning allegations and internal investigations. Have Ivan and Nell been set up, and if so, by whom?
Secrets…
As time runs out, their only chance at redemption is to find the killer. But the more they uncover, the more harrowing the mystery becomes, and a past long forgotten is thrown into scorching sunlight.
Because in Finnigans Gap, nothing stays buried for ever.
BONUS BOOKS
Coming 5 January 2023:
Deadman’s Creek by Chris Hammer
Newly-minted homicide detective Nell Buchanan returns to her hometown, annoyed at being assigned a decades-old murder – a ‘file and forget’.
But this is no ordinary cold case, her arrival provoking an unwelcome and threatening response from the small-town community. As more bodies are discovered, and she begins to question how well she truly knows those closest to her, Nell realises that finding the truth could prove more difficult – and dangerous – than she’d ever expected.
The nearer Nell comes to uncovering the secrets of the past, the more treacherous her path becomes. Can she survive to root out the truth, and what price will she have to pay for it?
The Pit by Peter Papathanasiou
“Outback noir has a new star” Mark Sanderson, The Times
With DS Manolis on leave in Greece, Senior Constable Sparrow receives a phone call from a man who wants to turn himself in.
Bob is sixty-five years old, confined to a Perth nursing home. But thirty years ago, he killed a man in the remote northern Kimberley mining region. He offers to show Sparrow where the body is, but there’s a catch: Sparrow must travel north with him under the guise of being his carer.
They are accompanied on the drive by another nursing home resident: Luke, thirty years old, paralysed in a motorbike accident. As they embark on their road trip through the guts of Western Australia, pursued by outback police and adrenaline-soaked miners, Sparrow begins to suspect that Bob’s desire to head north may have sinister motivations. Is Luke being held against his will? And what lies in store for them when they reach their goal?
Outback by Patricia Wolf
TWO MISSING BACKPACKERS. ONE VAST OUTBACK.
DS Lucas Walker is on leave in his hometown, Caloodie, taking care of his dying grandmother. When two young German backpackers, Berndt and Rita, vanish from the area, he finds himself unofficially on the case.
But why all the interest from the Federal Police when they have probably just ditched the heat and dust of the outback for the coast? Working in the organised crime unit has opened Walker’s eyes to the growing drug trade in Australia’s remote interior – and he becomes convinced there is more at play.
As the number of days since the couple’s disappearance climbs, Walker is joined by Rita’s older sister. A detective herself with Berlin CID, she has flown to Australia – desperate to find her sister.
Their search becomes ever more urgent as temperatures soar. Even if Walker does find the young couple, will it be too late?
Do you have any further titles to build this list? Let us know in the comments below!
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Wild Dogs by Michael Trant couldn’t take place anywhere except the outback of Australia. I picked it up in an Adelaide bookstore just after seeing an art exhibit with the same name. No connection between the two but an interesting book nevertheless.