Canberra

An imaginative romp through the dark underbelly of politics by two veteran Canberra insiders.

When seasoned newshound Harry Dunkley is slipped a compromising photograph one frosty Canberra dawn he knows he′s onto something big. In pursuit of the scoop, Dunkley must negotiate the deadly corridors of power where the minority Toohey Government hangs by a thread - its stricken Foreign Minister on life support, her heart maintained by a single thought. Revenge.

Sacked from ASIO for his involvement in the Peace Crimes Affair, Ramdas Nair is now a private detective facing bankruptcy. He can sink no lower. Or so he thinks.

Ramdas Nair should know by now that asking questions can get you into trouble, and that's just what he finds when he teams up with Persephone Tsakas, a renegade journalist. Together they sniff out a trail of dirty deals, infidelity and blackmail which leads to the prime minister's right-hand man.

Think ahead five or so years from now, to an Australia transformed by the never-ending war on terror. Canberra has been wiped out in a nuclear attack. There is a permanent state of emergency. Security check-points, citizenship tests, identity cards and detention without trial have all become the norm. Suspect minorities have been locked away into ghettos. And worse - no one wants to play cricket with us anymore.

Niall Howley has been spending night after night playing an interactive computer game when he's found dead at the bottom of the Telstra tower in Canberra.

From a graphic left on his computer, it is apparent that his actual death mimics in an eerie way the death already scripted for him in the game.

The police and the coroner call it suicide, but Niall's mother hires Sandra Mahoney, computer crime consultant, to help her understand what has really happened.

I should ask your department's accountant whether he's missing nine hundred thousand bucks. This is the anonymous message that will change Sandra Mahoney's life.

When a powerful but unpopular bureaucrat is accused of theft and computer fraud, Sandra is convinced that the charge is false. But how to track down the culprit when almost anyone could be an enemy?

When Helen Plathe sets out along the Barwon River path for her first day at Highlands woollen mill, she is following in the footsteps of her mother, her uncle, and her grandfather.

Inside Highlands' tall black gates, Helen is initiated into an extraordinary world and discovers its secret history.

One for the Master is the fourth novel of critically acclaimed author Dorothy Johnston.

Sophie Harper is abandoned by her husband and left with a four-year-old daughter to support. She finds work in an old house in Canberra that is being used as a brothel. She falls under the house's eerie, yet strangely comforting spell, and discovers within herself not only the ability to perform well, and delight in the freedom bought by an independent income, but the capacity to learn from the men and women she encounters there. One of these men, Jack, teaches her more about revenge than she ever wished to know.

Eden Carmichael, a politician, is found dead in a brothel on a hot afternoon. Sandra Mahoney mulls over a demeaning photograph showing Carmichael in a dress and blonde wig. When a lobby group asks her to investigate a company producing filters for the internet, Mahoney is surprised to discover a trail that others have ignored.

When a famous, but hated, movie producer seems to have been killed by the very film technique he claimed to have invented, journalist Peter Caridman turns detective. The tightly woven plot, against a glamorous Canberra background, moves to a brilliant conclusion.