The Cricketer’s Arms: A Clyde Smith Mystery
Book 1 of the Clyde Smith Mysteries Series
(July 2019) MoshPit Publishing, Australia
Clyde Smith is brought into the investigation of the ritualised death of pin-up boy cricketer, Daley Morrison, by his former colleague, Sam Telford, after a note is found in the evidence bags with Clyde’s initials on it. Someone wants ex-Detective Sergeant Smith to investigate the crime from outside the police force. It can only mean one thing—corruption at the highest levels.
The Cricketer’s Arms is an old-fashioned, pulp fiction detective novel, set in beachside Sydney in 1956. It follows the intricacies of a complex murder case, involving a tight-knit group of queer men, sports match-fixing, and a criminal drug cartel.
Was Daley Morrison killed because of his sexual proclivities, or was his death a signal to others to tread carefully? Has Clyde Smith been fingered as the man for the case, or will the case be the end of the road for the war veteran detective?
The Gilded Madonna: A Clyde Smith Mystery
Book 2 of the Clyde Smith Mysteries Series
(April 2021) MoshPit Publishing, Australia
Clyde Smith’s quiet, happy life, in love for the first time, working as a private detective and journalist, is suddenly thrown into disarray by the appearance, after a three year hiatus, of a body bearing the distinctive hallmarks of a string of murders he hadn’t been able to solve when working in homicide.
Forced to cooperate with the new detective sergeant who’d taken his place in the local cop shop, Clyde has to not only deal with the enormous chip on the young man’s shoulder, but also with a complex case that involves kidnapping, the re-emergence of the Silent Cop Killer, the historical abuse of young men and boys in orphanages across the State, and a ghost from the past who is out for revenge.
Will Clyde and the new DS be able to find the killer before he finds them? Or will they be his final prize, the last victims in his string of grisly murders? Perhaps only the local psychic, owner of a Romany religious statue, the Gilded Madonna, can provide the clue that might ultimately solve the puzzle, but which will also lead Clyde and DS Dioli into mortal danger.
The Grocers’ Son: A Clyde Smith Mystery
Book 3 of the Clyde Smith Mysteries Series
(September 2022) MoshPit Publishing, Australia
An apparition in Sydney’s fruit and vegetable market leaves the mother of one of Clyde’s best friends believing that her brother, hanged for murder twenty-four years beforehand, has somehow risen from the grave and confronted her.
She is adamant that the visitation was real and visits Clyde asking him to investigate the mass murder her brother was supposed to have committed. She believes he was either set up or was covering for someone else’s crime.
Could this vision have been a folie à deux, a delusional vision shared by both mother or son? As Clyde investigates, clues lead him to one of Australia’s most famous silent screen actors, a man who, together with his murdered father, becomes intrinsically linked to the mass murder, known as The Killing at Candal Creek.
Wheels within wheels, lies, extortion, and coverups lead Clyde to a bloody confrontation on a deserted beach in the tropics. This time, it’s not only his own life at risk but also that of one of his most valued and closest friends.
The Seventh of December: The Czarina’s Necklace
Book 1 of the Seventh of December Series
(Dec 2020) MoshPit Publishing, Australia
As bombs rain down over London during the Blitz, Major Tommy Haupner negotiates the rubble-filled streets of Bloomsbury on his way to perform at a socialite party. The explosive event of the evening is not his virtuosic violin playing, but the ‘almost-blond’ American who not only insults him, but then steals his heart.
The Seventh of December follows a few months in the lives of two Intelligence agents in the early part of World War Two. Set against the backdrop of war-torn occupied Europe, Tommy and his American lover, Henry Reiter, forge a committed relationship that is intertwined with intrigues that threaten the integrity of the British Royal Family and the stability of a Nation at war.
Neither bombs nor bullets manage to break the bond that these men form in their struggle against Nazism and the powers of evil.
X for Extortion: 14 Manchester Square
Book 2 of the Seventh of December Series
(Sep 2021) MoshPit Publishing, Australia
After returning from a secret mission in occupied France for His Royal Highness, George, the Duke of Kent, Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Haupner is looking forward to a cup of tea, a hot bath, and the sleepy head of his American lover, Major Henry Reiter on his shoulder when he wakes up the next morning.
However, along with items Tommy has recovered for the duke, he has also discovered a secret stash of documents, which, when opened, prove to be a poisoned chalice. Tommy and Shorty find themselves caught up in a dangerous web of lies, enemy agents, assassins, and traitors. In an effort to save the reputations of not only their friends, but men and women high in both society and in the government, they themselves become victims of I.K.S., a former World War One international extortion ring, which has risen, phoenix-like, from the ashes of bomb-devastated London.
Farewell, My Boy
Book 3 of the Seventh of December Series
(March 2023) MoshPit Publishing, Australia
From the deserts of North Africa to the dark forests in the Third Reich, Tommy Haupner, together with his American lover, Henry “Shorty” Reiter, lead their team in a daring mission to rescue a gifted young savant from Nazi Germany’s T4 euthanasia program.
They are forced to flee in a stolen bus in the dead of night across enemy territory with a precious cargo of 24 handicapped children destined for extermination. In a supreme effort to save their charges and to avoid capture and execution themselves, they mount the most daring and dangerous rescue mission possible, the results of which almost end in disaster.
This third book in The Seventh of December series is an action packed wartime adventure set in the early months of 1942. Stolen aircraft, kidnapped senior Nazi officials, doctors of death and bloody revenge massacres, all of which are intertwined with the love of a helpless, rescued child. Farewell, My Boy, deals with not only the frailty of men’s hearts, but the truth that even the bravest are not exempt from the pain of loss, even when it is for a greater good.
My Name is Jimmy
(June 2022) MoshPit Publishing, Australia – Ebook only
In 1947, James “Jimmy” Bacon becomes involved in a violent workplace altercation fuelled by a PTSD-induced rage. His boss, a fellow war-veteran, tells him to take a few months off work, have a holiday, go somewhere warm, and get his head together.
Jimmy decides to take a coastal steamer to the northernmost outpost of Australia, Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory, to visit the grave of his oldest friend, Sandy, killed during the Japanese bombing of the city in 1942. Upon arriving, he discovers that Sandy’s death is not as simple as military records seemed to indicate. After learning that Sandy’s grave contains only an arm with no distinguishing features, he starts asking questions around town in order to find out what really happened to his mate.
The more he asks, the more he discovers that Darwin is less about post-war reconstruction and more about drugs, gambling, and the excessive consumption of alcohol. It’s a lawless city where 95% of the population is male and prostitution is banned, creating a thriving underworld where rough frontier-town blokes and men from the armed forces are doing more with each other than having a beer and passing the time of day.
While digging deeper, Jimmy discovers a terrible truth, arousing the interest of men who would do anything to keep the past a secret—men who consider his life of little value. Jimmy is forced to rely on quick thinking and his army training when death comes looking for him in the dead of night.
Servants of the Crown: The Turkish Pretender
(March 2022) MoshPit Publishing, Australia
Intelligencers: men and women from all walks of life and from all sections of society, servants of the Crown who work for the Home Office gathering information vital to the security of the nation.
London, 1855. While Great Britain is at war with the Russians in the Crimea, a cadre of disaffected seditionists and insurrectionists, made up of members of the aristocracy and wealthy industrialists, have set a plan into action that’s been decades in the making—a plan that aims to overthrow the Queen and to install a puppet king on the throne in her place. With the war raging and disquiet in the industrial north and in Ireland, their perfidious plot, unless stopped, threatens to bring about anarchy and revolution.
Aware of the imminent danger, Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, has tasked The Brothers, a band of four men, friends of over twenty years, to root out the source of the infection, destroy the clique, and track down and eradicate its foreign pretender by any means necessary. From molly houses to state banquets, from hospitals to steam baths, from aristocratic households to the meanest of slums, the friends find themselves in a succession of increasingly perilous situations.
Like the mighty Thames, undercurrents flow swift and deep as they uncover plot after plot and treachery and treason in abundance.
Wheelchair: Antarctica. Snow and Ice
(Sept 2020) MoshPit Publishing, Australia
You can never judge an academic book by its cover. Simon Dyson, a quiet assistant professor, is a man of hidden depths. To the world he presents as a harmless, innocuous, shy and retiring intellectual. However, the man who lurks behind that public persona is far more interesting … and dangerous … and driven.
Wheelchair is a slow-burn contemporary psychological crime thriller about a man who suffers from both OCD and PTSD, a man who is unwittingly caught up in a cross-border war between rival crime gangs—a conflict that almost leads to his death, and more than once.
It’s a study of compulsion and of disability, and of the many faces of emotional dependence and sexual compulsion. It’s about how some men cannot just love or make love because their hearts or their bodies lead them to it, but who can only connect emotionally and physically through self-imposed rituals which involve struggle or self-abasement.
The House of a Thousand Stairs
(March 2020) MoshPit Publishing, Australia
Warrambool
In Gamilaraay, the language of the Kamilaroi peoples of north-western New South Wales, it’s the word for The Milky Way. It’s also the name of Peter Dixon’s homestead and sheep station, situated in the lee of the Liverpool Ranges.
In 1947, Peter returns from war, his parents and younger brother dead, the property de-stocked and his older brother, Ron, having emptied out the family bank account and nowhere to be found.
The House With a Thousand Stairs is the story of a young man, scarred both on the inside and the outside, trying to re-establish what once was a prosperous and thriving sheep station with the help of his neighbours and his childhood friend, Frank Hunter, the local Indigenous policeman.
Enveloped by the world of Indigenous spirituality, the Kamilaroi system of animal guides and totems, Peter and Frank discover the true nature of their predestined friendship, one defined by the stars, the ancestral spirits, and Baiame, the Creator God and Sky Father of The Dreaming.
Maliyan bandaarr, maliyan biliirr.
Australia’s Son
(Nov 2019) MoshPit Publishing, Australia
A wrongly delivered letter sparks a chain of events that threaten the life of Edward Murray, “Australia’s Son”, the most renowned operatic baritone of his day.
It is 1902, and Edward has just returned to the Metropole Hotel after a performance of La Bohème at the Theatre Royal in Sydney, when the manager phones his apartment to tell him the police have arrived with bad news.
Edward, and his vaudeville performer brother, Theodore, are shocked to hear that Edward’s dresser, the brothers’ oldest friend from childhood, has been found dead, stabbed in the back, in Edward’s recently vacated dressing room. Following a sequence of gruesome killings, Edward and the detective assigned to protect him, Chief Constable Andrew Bolton, are lured into a trap by a man whose agenda is not only personal, but driven by a deranged mind.
Set around the theatre world of early Edwardian Sydney, the story is steeped in the world of class divides, of music and the theatre. Its themes of murder, treachery and foul play, are ofttimes confronting, but the story is linked throughout by Edward Murray, the man with the golden voice, whose overarching belief is that even in the darkest of times, a sliver of light can mean that hope is at hand.
The Boys of Bullaroo: Tales of War, Aussie Mateship and More
(Nov 2018), MoshPit Publishing, Australia
Six tales of men and war, spanning sixty years, and linked by a fictional outback town called Bullaroo. From the deserts of Egypt in 1919 to the American R&R in 1966, the stories follow the loves, losses and sexual awakenings of Australians both on the battlefield and in the bush.
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