Showing results by narrator "Peter Hosking" in All Categories

Two rural families flee to the city and find themselves sharing a great, breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet, where they begin their lives from scratch. For 20 years they roister and rankle, laugh and curse until the roof over their heads becomes a home for their hearts.

A true insider's story of the backpacker murders from the detective who led the team that arrested Ivan Milat. Milat - the serial killer who preyed on young hitchhikers. The backpackers - the innocent victims of a brutal murderer. Belanglo - a place that became synonymous with pure evil. It was the biggest and most complex manhunt in Australian history, an investigation that gripped a nation. Behind the many false leads and dead ends, precious clues emerged that pointed to one man.

Alby's partner Harry is gunned down in a Double Bay coffee shop. By lunchtime Alby realizes someone wants him dead - and they want him dead now. All Alby wants is some pasta, a good bottle of wine and to know more about the mysterious Grace Goodluck. But he also has to figure out who shot Harry and who wants him dead. Unfortunately for Alby, the answer lies over the razor wire and past mines protecting a top-secret US military facility deep in the central Australian desert. Now that can really ruin your day.

A standalone novel from the author of the classic Australian Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte mystery series. Harry Tremayne, a policeman, goes to an isolated valley in the remote Murchison region of Western Australia to find his brother - who vanished a month earlier while investigating the murder of a police detective. Do the gold smugglers at Breakaway House hold the answers to the mystery? First published as a serial in the Perth Daily News in 1932, the real setting for Breakaway House is Mt Magnet, about 580km north of Perth, deep in gold country.

The discovery of the stolen red monoplane on the dry, flat bottom of Emu Lake meant many things to many people. For Elizabeth Nettlefold, the chance to nurse its strangely ill passenger meant a new purpose in life. For Dr Knowles, brilliant physician and town drunk, it meant the revival of a romantic dream. For a person or persons unknown, it meant a murder plan gone badly awry. And for Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, it meant one of the toughest cases of his career.

Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte leaves his familiar outback environment for Melbourne and a nearby mountain resort on special assignment for Military Intelligence. Although out of his element among city people, Bony displays his characteristic skills to interpret some puzzling clues and catch a murderer - providing the ingredients for another fascinating Arthur Upfield mystery.

A cat ... a ping-pong ball ... a drunken gardener ... With these slight clues to go on Detective-Inspector Bonaparte investigates the mysterious death of famous author, Mervyn Blake, who dies an agonizing death late one night in his writing room. But how did he die? No one knows. No one that is until Bony's acute observation of human nature uncovers the murderer - and the method used to kill Blake.

Martin Carter is having a crook day. His home life's a misery, he's been retrenched by the bank, and everyone's forgotten his birthday. But a million-dollar payroll, a pistol, and a split-second decision change everything. Hurtling north on a motorcycle with the intriguing Faith, Martin encounters a mysterious hit-man, a new-age bike gang, a reclusive media mogul, and the booby-trapped mountain hideout of an old schoolmate.

Why was the redoubtable King Henry, an aborigine from Western Australia, killed during a thunderstorm in New South Wales? What was the feud that led to murder after nineteen long years had passed? And who was the woman who saw the murder and kept silent? This first story of Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, the half-aborigine detective, takes him to a sheep station in the Darling River bush country where he encounters those problems he understands so well... mixed blood and divided loyalties.

Joe Cashin was different once. He moved easily then; was surer and less thoughtful. But there are consequences when you’ve come so close to dying. For Cashin, they included a posting away from the world of Homicide to the quiet place on the coast where he grew up. Now all he has to do is play the country cop and walk the dogs. And sometimes think about how he was before. But then prominent local Charles Bourgoyne is bashed and left for dead....

Broome is a small, sun-drenched town on the barren northwest coast of Australia. It's small enough that everyone knows everyone else's business. How, then, did someone murder two widows in similar fashion and not leave any clues? It's a case for Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, who arrives on the scene incognito. He's barely begun his investigation when a third woman is killed. Bony realises that he is dealing with a madman, and that time is running out to stop a forth murder.

Hooked on the limitless profits of the drug trade, organised crime has grown so powerful that it now poses a major threat to Australia's national security. Clive Small and Tom Gilling show how Australian crime gangs, in partnership with violent international syndicates, have exploited lax law enforcement and corruption on the nation's waterfront to import narcotics on a vast scale from Europe, Asia, Africa and South America.

The incomparable Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte is back - and now he must solve one of his most baffling cases. When Bony sets out to investigate two bizarre murders at Wirragatta Station, deep in the Australian Outback, all the odds are against him. The crimes were committed a year before, the scent is now cold, and any surviving clues have been confused by a bumbling policeman. As Bony gets closer to the trail, the mysterious murderer sets out to stop him. Can Bony stop the killer first?

Homicide detective Harry Belltree wouldn’t usually be looking too hard at an elderly couple’s suicide pact. Especially now, when his brother-in-law, Greg, has just been stabbed to death. But it seems Greg and the old couple had ties to the same man, a bent moneylender with friends in high places - and low. Harry can’t get officially involved in Greg’s murder, but he suspects a link with two other mysterious deaths: his parents'.

The police never notice the small detail in the background of a police photograph of an abandoned car. A detail that tells Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte plainly that the mysterious disappearance of Luke Marks near Windee Station is anything but accidental. Why had Luke Marks driven specially out to Windee? Had he been murdered or had he, as the local police believed, wandered away from his car and been overwhelmed in a dust-storm? Bony feels the answers lie somewhere in the sands of Windee.

An entertaining collection of insider yarns by an Aussie Test cricket legend. 'In the Test arena, Dennis Lillee was never beaten. West Indian champion Viv Richards had taken the sword to all the international bowlers of his era. But when he came up against Lillee, it was a heavyweight fight between unrelenting combatants. Their contests were always take-no-prisoners affairs.'

This is the story of Kiril Lakota, a cardinal who reluctantly steps out from behind the Iron Curtain to lead the Catholic Church and to grapple with the many issues facing the contemporary world. The pope is dead, and the corridors of the Vatican hum with intrigue as cardinals gather to elect his successor. The result is a surprise: the new pope is the youngest of them all - a bearded Ukrainian. The Shoes of the Fisherman is the moving story of Kiril I, recently released from 17 years in Siberian labour camps and haunted by his past.

On June 15, 1862, a gang of bushrangers held up a gold escort at Eugowra, just east of Forbes, NSW. They escaped with a pile of cash and 77 kilograms of gold, worth about $10 million today. It remains the largest gold robbery in Australian history. In this riveting recreation of the events, James Phelps finally tells the full story of how Frank Gardiner, Ben Hall, John O'Meally, Johnny Gilbert, Henry Manns, Alexander Fordyce, John Bow and Dan Charters planned and executed the robbery - and what happened to all that gold.

Among the 28,000 inhabitants of Broken Hill there stalks a killer. Already two elderly bachelors have died horribly from cyanide poisoning. Now, two months later, Detective Inspector Napolean Bonaparte faces a cold trail - no motive, no clues. So Bony waits for what he believes to be inevitable - a third killing.

All Alby wants is a decent coffee and a day off. But there's a hijacked tanker with a deadly cargo in Sydney Harbor, and bullets are flying on board a U.S. Navy cruiser. Three sailors are dead and a Seahawk chopper is missing.