Scribe

It is 1919. The Great War has ended, but the Spanish flu epidemic is raging across Australia. Schools are closed, state borders are guarded by armed men, and train travel is severely restricted. There are rumours it is the end of the world.

A young petty criminal, Lee, wakes in a seedy motel with a bullet in his side and a suitcase of stolen money, his memory hazy as to how he got there.  Soon he meets Wild, a doctor who is escaping his own disastrous life, and the two men set out for the safety of the countryside.

When Samir Al-Hassani does the impossible, and escapes from Guantanamo Bay, a chain of events is set off that is to lead to tears and bloodshed around the world. Sami, a young Palestinian who had been caught in Iraq, thinks he has been helped by fellow jihadis, but the CIA and Mossad are pulling his strings. Or are they?

The first of September was a special day for schoolchildren in Beslan, traditionally celebrated as the 'Day of Knowledge'. But after September 2004 the day would be remembered for all the wrong reasons, when a group of terrorists took hostages at Beslan's School Number One.

As Word War II drags on, failed Shakespearian actor and would-be private detective William Power Returns to Melbourne in disgrace after his disastrous brush with theatre and murder in Maryborough. Bloodied, broken but somehow unbowed, he arrives in a town struggling under war rationing and resentful of cocky American soldiers, and lands squarely in the bosom of his childhood home in Carlton -  a home now dominated by his sister-in-law, the odious Darlene.

A satire on life in small-town Australia, this clever murder mystery introduces William Power - actor, raconteur, and Shakespearean impresario. In 1942, with war raging in Europe and the Pacific, the Japanese army is on Australia's doorstep, and the small coastal Queensland town of Maryborough is on full alert. They are not, however, prepared for the arrival of a troupe of incompetent actors whose unjustifiably self-confident leader is determined to bring his daring production of Titus Andronicus to the rural barbarians.

Failed Shakesperean actor and would-be private investigator Will Power's unique detective skills are, once again, in demand.  The Japanese army is rampaging through the islands of the South Pacific and Australia's front line of defence is a top-secret, crack division of men embedded deep in the tropical wilderness of northern Australia.  But something is threatening their vital, covert mission:  one of this elite corps is a murderer, preying on his comrades, one by one.

Oxford, 2006: a young woman is found brutally murdered, her throat cut. Her heart has been removed and in its place lies an apparently ancient gold coin.

Twenty-four hours later, another woman is found. The MO is identical, except that this time her brain has been removed, and a silver coin lies glittering in the bowl of her skull.

The Pyjama Girl was an unknown woman, found dumped by a road near Albury in 1934.  She had been brutally murdered.  Who she was, and who killed her, became Australia's great unsolved crime for decades.

The body was preserved in formalin, her image circulated around the world.  The mystery fascinated the nation and, for some, became an obsession

Ten years later, the body was identified and a man was convicted of her manslaughter.  The case, it seemed, was neatly solved.