Summer on the Peninsula. The heat’s ramping up, the usual holiday madness building. D.I. Hal Challis is already recycling his shower water and starting to dread Christmas. But this year there’s something more. Women abducted and murdered on the Old Highway. A pall of fear over the scorched...

An unidentified man is fished out of the sea with an anchor strapped to his waist. And for D.I. Hal Challis, this sparks the beginning of a chilling series of shotgun killings. As Challis investigates, a farmer on the peninsula erupts into violence and is the target of a massive manhunt. And...

The neat suburban homes of the Peninsula seem like an improbable setting for sex parties, blackmail and murder. But when D.I. Hal Challis is called to investigate the murder of Janine McQuarrie – shot in a deserted country lane in front of her seven-year-old daughter – his progress is...

Ten-year-old Katie Blasko is missing. Detective Sergeant Ellen Destry, alert to rumours of a paedophile ring operating on the Peninsula, is thinking abduction. Her colleagues are thinking bad family, truancy. Her boss is thinking about the media. Her partner D. I. Hal Challis is a thousand...

Now that they are lovers, Detective Inspector Hal Challis and Sergeant Ellen Destry must guard their affections closely, for romantic relationships are strictly forbidden by department regulations. Trying to keep their professional and personal lives separate, they investigate the brutal assault of a private school chaplain as well as the murder of a public official. Applying further pressure is a prominent politician who has no love for police and wants the first case closed quickly.

When hordes of eighteen-year-olds descend on the Mornington Peninsula to celebrate the end of exams, a brutal bashing attracts political attention. The victim is connected, and now D. I. Hal Challis is facing interference from on high. Newly embarked on a relationship with his Sergeant, Ellen...

D.I. Hal Challis is in trouble with the boss and missing his lover, Ellen Destry, who is overseas. 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...

A small bushfire, but nasty enough for ice cooks to abandon their lab. Fatal, too. But when the bodies in the burnt-out Mercedes prove to be a pair of Sydney hitmen, D.I. Hal Challis’s inquiries into a local ice epidemic take a darker turn. Meanwhile, Ellen Destry, head of the new sex crimes...