A Hal Challis Investigation Series

The Ned Kelly Award–winning master of Australian noir shows us the darker side of the Peninsula. A major meth-related crime confounds Inspector Hal Challis, while Sergeant Ellen Destry hunts down an elusive serial rapist.

A pair of hit men have a very bad day, and the resulting bushfire draws attention to a meth lab and two burned bodies in a Mercedes. As Inspector Hal Challis of the Crime Investigation Unit struggles to link these events to major meth suppliers flooding the Peninsula with drugs, he also finds himself spending valuable time fending off jurisdictional challenges from Melbourne’s Major Drug Investigative Division. Meanwhile, Sgt. Ellen Destry, of CIU’s sex crimes unit, is hunting for a serial rapist who is extremely adept at not leaving clues. A tense, human, and at times darkly funny entry into Disher’s celebrated Ned Kelly Award–winning series.

The long-awaited sixth installment in the Inspector Hal Challis series set in Australia, available in the United States at last!
 
Hal Challis is in trouble at home and abroad: dressed down by the boss for speaking out about police budget cuts; missing his lover, Ellen Destry, who is overseas on a study tour. But there’s plenty to keep his mind off his problems. A rapist in a police uniform stalks Challis’s Peninsula beat, there is a serial armed robber headed in his direction and a home invasion that’s a little too close to home. Not to mention a very clever, very mysterious female cat burglar who may or may not be planning something on Challis’s patch. Meanwhile, at the Waterloo Police Station, Challis finds his officers have their own issues. Scobie Sutton, still struggling with his wife’s depression, seems to be headed for a career crisis; and something very interesting is going on between Constable Pam Murphy and Jeanne Schiff, the feisty young sergeant on assignment from the Sex Crimes Unit.

The fifth Hal Challis investigation, set in southeast Australia

It’s been a busy few days for Inspector Hal Challis. The school year has just ended, and with the sudden influx of rowdy teenagers on break, Waterloo has become a hotbed for petty crimes. But there are also more serious matters at hand. A well-connected chaplain at a prestigious school has been brutally beaten, and a local official has turned up dead. If Challis was having a hard time keeping up with the caseload before, it certainly hasn’t helped matters that he’s become romantically involved with his colleague Ellen Destry. Challis struggles to maintain a clear head as the crimes mount. Will their relationship derail all they’ve worked for?

Winner of the Ned Kelly Award for Best Novel

Inspector Hal Challis has been summoned to his boyhood home, Mawson’s Bluff in the Australian Outback, where his father is dying. There his past comes back to haunt him . . . and endanger his life. Meanwhile, a serial pedophile is on the loose on the Mornington Peninsula, and Sergeant Ellen Destry, who is left to head up the area’s Crime Investigation Unit, must find a little girl who was abducted from the fairgrounds at the annual Waterloo Show before it is too late.

It takes months for Australian social psychologist Janine McQuarrie to succumb to her husband’s pressure to attend spouse-swapping parties, but eventually she gives in. Then, driving with her young daughter one day, she gets out of her car to ask directions and is shot and killed. The little girl escapes when the gunman’s pistol misfires.

 Inspector Hal Challis of the Crime Investigation Unit is assigned the case, but his efforts are thwarted by his boss. The dead woman was Superintendent McQuarrie’s daughter-in-law, and he  seems to be more interested in protecting his son than in finding his daughter-in-law’s murderer. Who might have a motive to kill this attractive young wife and mother? One of her clients? One of the swingers she’d gotten together with at a party? Or, the obvious suspect, her husband?

From the two-time winner of the Ned Kelly Award and the German Crime Fiction Critix Circle Prize

A missing two-year-old girl, an unidentified drowning victim, arson, and the threat of murder bring Homicide Squad Inspector Hal Challis of the Mornington Peninsula Police Force and his staff to Bushrangers Bay, an Australian seaside resort outside Melbourne. Allis not idyllic in this resort community—far from it. Cars are stolen and torched; letter boxes are burned; and the Kittyhawk airplane of an attractive aerial photographer suffers malicious damage.

Meet Hal Challis, Detective for the Mornington Peninsula police force in Southeast Australia, in the first investigation in this prize-winning crime series
 
A serial killer is on the loose in a small coastal town near Melbourne, Australia. Detective Inspector Hal Challis and his team must apprehend him before he strikes again. But first, Challis has to contend with the editor of a local newspaper who undermines his investigation at every turn, and with his wife, who attempts to resurrect their marriage through long-distance phone calls from a sanitarium, where she has been committed for the past eight years for attempted murder—his.