Hard Boiled

A brilliant Melbourne crime novel, told in ten hardboiled stories.

John Dorn is a private investigator. Just like his father used to be. It says ‘private inquiry agent’ in John’s yellow pages ad because that’s what his old man called himself, back before his business folded, his wife left him and he drank himself to death. 

But John’s not going to end up like his father. He doesn’t have a wife, or much business. He doesn’t really drink, either. Not yet. 

'There is no god,' I told him. Then I drove the syringe up into his nostril and straight through the side of his nose.'Joe Panther is a psychotic, alcoholic, violent, substance-abusing heroin dealer. He is also, he believes, Joshua Ben Pantera, born two thousand years ago, the son of Mary and the Lord God Yaweh Himself, not dead yet, the crucified Jesus: still around, abandoned by his Father, abused by the world, and as pissed off as hell.

Jet Black has left her barmaid duties behind to run some valuable merchandise to the next city.

The merchandise? Drugs? Stolen Goods? Nope, something much much better. She's managed to get hold of the world's only copy of Julius Caesar's long-lost masterpiece, Dr Analogia. All she has to do is deliver it to a black market dealer known as the Polymath and she'll finally have made herself a fortune.

But there's a catch or two along the way.

Joe Panther is a man with many secrets. Dangerous secrets. He is a drug dealer. He is a killer. He is a private investigator. Above all, he is the messiah, fallen on hard times.

When a young woman is found crucified and decapitated in a melbounre inner-city church, the police suspect the local priest, a man with dark secrets of hiis own. The priest hires Panther to clear his name.

Soon Panther becomes both the hunter and the hunted.Nothing is as it seems-not even, perhaps, Panther's own sense of self.

Mark Chamberlain is a man who has everything - a job he loves; the jail tattoos to prove it; a cop on his trail; and a houseful of stolen electrical goods. All he's missing is Caroline May, and she's been gone for twenty-five years. Nobody knows what happened to Caroline, though they still tell the stories. One afternoon her parents came home and she just wasn't there. They searched all of North Head, all of Auckland, looking for a blonde fourteen-year-old. They covered the city with posters; the cops drowned in paperwork. She was seen on the ferry, on a plane, with a stranger, on her own.

I've seen plenty of girls with slut written all over them, but never one like this.

She was near naked, tied to a bed and the killer had driven a sharp object through her heart.

'Slut' had been written on her skin with a black pen.

MURDER IS NEVER PRETTY ... EVEN WHEN THE CORPSE IS A BLONDE CHAPTER ONE I was cruising west along Great Eastern Highway, going nowhere in particular, waiting for the call. It was one of those nights. It was hot, the moon was full and the dregs of society were restless. Black storm clouds hung over the Perth hills to the east and we'd had a drizzle of rain. It was enough to bring out the smell of hot tar. It had been a long day and I knew it was going to be a long night. I needed a drink of good old Queensland rum but the wagging finger in the back of my brain told me I had to stay sane.

'Look at that monolith', he said, and Danny turned his head, seeing the massive new casino complex. 'That', said Sigmund, 'is a shrine to all our false hopes and dreams. Enter here for the brave new world. After thousands of years of evolution, that's what humankind has come up with, Danny boy. You can shove your idealism, your education. Pick a card, roll the dice, place your bets. That's what it's all about in the clever country.'

This raunchy page-turner features Shaun McCreadie, a young police detective who finds himself on the wrong side of the law and implicated in a brutal home invasion. When McCreadie is released from jail 11 years later he is determined to discover the nature of the crime that put him away. Armed with $2.8 million in ill-gotten gains and his police street smarts, McCreadie grapples with murderous former accomplices, corrupt old cop buddies, and the seductive wife of a prominent lawyer in his quest to find answers.