In the last days of the Venetian Republic, the successive wives of Count Alvise Lanzi suffer mysterious, agonizing deaths. Murder Most Serene offers a cruel portrait of a beautiful but corrupt city-state and its equally extravagant and corrupt inhabitants. Redolent of darkness, death, poison and transgression, it is also an over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek Venetian romp. Rich in historical detail and bursting with bejeweled putrescence, Gabrielle Wittkop's chilling memento mori eschews the murder mystery in which it is garbed for a scintillating depiction of physical, moral, societal and institutional corruption, in which the author plays the role of puppeteer--"present, masked as convention dictates, while in a Venice on the brink of downfall, women gorged with venom burst like wineskins." Self-styled heir to the Marquis de Sade, Gabrielle Wittkop (1920-2002) was a French author who wrote a remarkable series of novels and travelogues, all laced with sardonic humor and dark sexuality, with recurrent themes of death, disease and decrepitude. After meeting Justus Wittkop, a German deserter, in Paris under the Occupation, she hid him from the Nazis and then married him after the war, in what she described as an "intellectual alliance," given he was homosexual. He would commit suicide in 1986, with her approval, after being diagnosed with Parkinson's. Her first novel, The Necrophiliac, appeared in 1972, but a number of her books have only been made available since her own suicide in 2002, after she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

She's not responsible for the corpse this time. Okay, maybe just a little bit. Our favourite socialite and felon are back in a madcap new sleuthing adventure ... for readers of Janet Evanovich and Kerry Greenwood. She really didn't mean to become a detective ... Home for just 48 hours, billion-heiress Indigo-Daisy-Violet-Amber Hasluck-Royce-Jones-Bombberg has already committed two (completely understandable) felonies, reignited a childhood feud, been (possibly) humiliated (again) by her first love, and fallen over a nameless homeless dead man. All while strolling in her grandmother's garden ... Grandmother's kindly neighbour, Dame Elizabeth Holly, wants to spring the anonymous corpse from the coroner's freezer. She's convinced Indigo and her parolee personal assistant Esmerelda can unearth the man's identity, thus allowing his burial. Meanwhile Grandmother wants the unlikely duo to locate Dame Holly's possibly missing gentleman friend. Dame Holly's miserly granddaughter and not-so-bright son don't want her involved with any man - dead or alive. Are the cases related? Why are they receiving clues from an unknown helper? Should they cooperate with Detectives Searing and Burns, who tried to arrest Indigo for blowing up her plastic surgeon husband last summer? What is Esmerelda's secret? It's not so bad to undress a detective. Twice. Is it? How illegal can it be, really, to break into a top-secret government facility? They're not annoying a ruthless organised criminal on purpose, they're just trying to help ... PRAISE 'A wild romp ... jam-packed with colourful characters, crazy shenanigans, and cracking one-liners' Herald-Sun

Giles Jones, an out of work newspaperman sat on a bench watching the Thames flow by. There was a lot of traffic up and down the river at this time of night. Boats full of revellers were going past lights blazing, and music blaring. He had his camera on the seat beside him, just one good picture was all he needed. Something splashed in the water up stream from him, as it got nearer he thought it was a small boat, it had two lanterns and a bell on a rod which tinkled. It was a child's coffin and in the soft glow of the lanterns he could see that there was an occupant. This was the first victim of the Messenger of Death.

Stephen Killigan has been cold since the day he came to Cambridge as a senior lecturer. Something about the seven hundred years of history staining the stones of the university has given him a chill he can't shake. When he stumbles across the body of a missing beauty queen, he thinks he's found the reason. But when the police go to retrieve the body and find no trace, Killigan has found a problem - and a killer - that is the very opposite of reason.

Daisy and Hazel leap into action when a murder is committed on their cruise along the River Nile in Egypt.

When her grandfather dies, fourteen-year-old amateur detective Hazel Wong and her best friend Daisy Wells travel to Hong Kong, where the girls find themselves framed for murder and tangled up in a family mystery.

After accidentally blowing up her husband, can Indigo get back on her four-inch heels? In this madcap debut, One for the Money meets Crazy Rich Asians with a little Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries thrown in. The marriage of Aussie billion-heiress Indigo-Daisy-Violet-Amber Hasluck-Royce-Jones-Bombberg to conscientious reconstructive surgeon Dr Richard Bombberg has come to a spectacular end. In the middle of a cocktail party, Indigo set him and a mysterious redhead on fire. And then blew them and her penthouse up. All terrible accidents. When detectives discover explosive device remains in the charred penthouse, they're gunning for Indigo. Unless she can remain upright, stuff her dignity into her Chanel clutch and uncover the mystery redhead's identity, she's going to jail. To help Indigo, her semi-retired, semi-Buddhist, supermodel mother hires Esmerelda, a recent graduate of the model mentor prison program, as Indigo's personal assistant. Indigo and Esmerelda traverse Sydney's upper-class underbelly picking locks, outsmarting bankers and leprechauns, beating up feared gangsters, breaking into hospitals, setting a cathedral on fire (another terrible accident), bribing a giant fireman and some other stuff. How hard can all this be for an heiress and a felon?