Deborah Sheldon Books

To solve murders, you must understand the process of decomposition. Australia's newest body farm, the Victorian Taphonomic Experimental Research Institute, is hidden in bushland some four hours' drive from Melbourne. Scattered across its 150 acres are human donor cadavers and pig carcasses arranged to mimic some of the ways in which police might find murder victims: exposed to the elements, buried in a shallow grave, wrapped in tarpaulin. Forensic scientists and graduate students meticulously track each stage of putrefaction. Today, Detective Rick Evans of the Homicide Squad is at VITERI for the re-creation of one of his cold cases. A human donor will be locked inside a car. But the donor has other ideas... So begins a facility-wide outbreak of the reanimated dead.

The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, was hunted to extinction some eighty years ago. Now, Professor Rosie Giuliani and her staff at The Resurrection Lab have done the impossible: created a living, breathing litter from a preserved specimen. Yet Rosie can't share this scientific breakthrough with the world. The cloned animals are more like monsters than thylacines. By chance, a small band of activists hears about the caged litter, and their decision to free the tigers will unleash a deadly havoc upon the campus of Fraser University.

Dr. Erin Harris may be a scientist, but she has an unscientific obsession: to find a living Varanus priscus. Cryptozoologists call it the Devil dragon. This giant Australian reptile went extinct some 12,000 years ago but like Bigfoot or Nessie, there are occasional sightings. Spurred by a credible witness, Erin cobbles together an expedition party consisting of herself, the witness, and his deer-hunting neighbours. They travel into the unexplored heart of a remote national park. Erin, believing the Devil dragon to be a larger version of the Komodo, is confident she can outwit a specimen. However, the terrifying monster that lumbers out of the bush is a savage and unpredictable predator the size of a campervan. To escape, Erin must transform herself from genteel university lecturer to hard-core survivalist.

Taylor's Travelling Troupe of boxers has set up its tent at an isolated sheep station: bored farmers always bet to excess. Headlining the bare-knuckle fighters is Bluey, marketed as 'The Man-Beast', a Sasquatch-like monster, chained and kept drunk enough to fight punters without killing them. But the troupe has returned to where Bluey was first captured. Recognising the mountains, he calls again and again. And when his call is answered, all hell breaks loose.