Female writers are currently dominating the Australian crime fiction scene, with more women writing crime, psychological thrillers, and domestic noir than men, writes reviewer ANNA CREER. 

One of the most successful writers currently dominating the Australian crime fiction scene is Dervla McTiernan.

Her 2018 debut novel The Ruin won the Davitt award for Best Adult Crime Novel and the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Novel.

Since then she has published a further six critically acclaimed, best-selling crime novels. 

Her latest, Three Reasons for Revenge (HarperCollins), however is a cause for celebration as it’s her first set in Australia.

McTiernan also introduces a female detective, Detective Sergeant Judith Lee, who works in the homicide squad in Melbourne and rides a BMW R1250 motorbike.

With her leather jacket and a buzzcut hairstyle, she looks “more like a jacked, angry Sinead O’Connor than a detective.” Judith is a tough experienced cop, hardened by trauma in her childhood. 

When a university student, Alexis Turner, walks into the police station, asks to speak to her and reports a sexual assault by a psychologist, Robert Walker, Judith remembers a complaint made against him 10 years earlier.

She wonders how many other women he has assaulted since then and becomes personally obsessed with bringing him to justice. 

However, Alexis immediately disappears and there’s no evidence of an Alexis Turner enrolled as a student. 

A day later, three mysterious parcels start to arrive at the door of three seemingly disconnected people: a TV celebrity, a struggling single father and a successful businesswoman. The parcels are outwardly identical.

“A shoebox, wrapped in embossed black paper and a crimson velvet ribbon… There was a flower too, a little coastal daisy tucked with the card under the ribbon”. It’s the content of the boxes that will bring devastation and even death to the three recipients. 

Judith realises that the instigator of the attacks knows their victims intimately and how to target them where they are most vulnerable. 

Three Reasons for Revenge is both an engrossing, thrilling revenge tragedy and a story of one woman’s strength and resilience to track down the sociopath responsible. And the ending will take your breath away. It’s terrifying, high-adrenaline reading! 

Three Reasons for Revenge will be published on April 28 and Dervla McTiernan will be in conversation with Chris Hammer at a free ANU Meet the Author event in Kambri cinema on April 30.

MELBOURNE bookseller and crime fiction reviewer Fiona Hardy is a relative newcomer. Her much anticipated debut crime novel, Unbury the Dead (2025) introduced private investigators Teddy and Alica, best friends “with flexible morals”.

Alice is the expert driver who carries a gun, while Teddy is the enforcer and she carries a knife. They can both be violent and dangerous if threatened. 

They work for the mysterious Choker, who runs what is “essentially a criminal enterprise, even if he peppered it with a lot of above-board jobs as well (private detection, chauffeuring, security, delivery) and he did so with the facade of a man who was just an everyday kind of boss running an everyday kind of company”.

The staff “pretended they were just like all their friends who worked in government offices” even though they know the business runs on the proceeds of violence. 

Alice and Teddy return in Old Games (Affirm Press) where they are tasked with finding the missing ashes of the late Ashley Perrineau, stolen from the house of his widower Suneet Prasad on the Mornington Peninsula. 

Perrineau was a famous tennis player with four grand slam wins, ranked number one in the world in the 2000s and the face of Nike in Australia for a decade. Seven years ago he had gone for a walk along the esplanade in Mount Martha, slipped, fell down a cliff and died. 

Alice and Teddy discover a multitude of suspects, all of whom have secrets and constantly lie, including an obsessive stalker; a jealous accountant; an ambitious sculptor; an ex doubles partner; Perrineau’s mother who has always wanted the ashes interred and his nephew, a policeman currently suspended for shooting a suspect. 

Old Games reveals a fresh approach to crime writing.There is crime but no dead bodies. It’s character rather than plot driven and, in Alice and Teddy, Hardy has created detectives confident in their investigating skills without being tortured by angst that other writers see as essential in their fictional detectives. They even have happy home lives. Although they are not normal, they are definitely not noir.