Barry Maitland Book order

Fraud, forgery and murder, set in the high-stakes world of fine art. 'Barry Maitland is one of Australia's finest crime writers.' - Sunday Tasmanian

Brock and Kolla return in an enthralling new mystery from a master of the genre.

In this, the final book of the Belltree Trilogy, DS Harry Belltree has gone bush. His obsessive pursuit of justice has cost him everything—his job, his marriage and his newborn child—but then his estranged wife disappears, leaving their baby daughter behind, and he is dragged back to Sydney. The police think Jenny has murdered a man. Harry thinks she’s in danger. When body parts are found maimed and strewn around a suburban park, his former colleagues are distracted by this apparently unrelated case. Harry is left to track Jenny down on his own—and to lay bare, at last, the extraordinary conspiracy that led to his parents’ murder. Barry Maitland was born in Scotland, studied architecture at Cambridge University and went on to work as an architect and urban design expert. In 1984 he moved to Australia to head the architecture school at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales. In 1994 The Marx Sisters, the first in his Brock and Kolla crime series, was published. Barry now writes fiction full time. He is published throughout the English-speaking world and in translation in a number of other countries, including Germany, Italy, France and Japan. He lives in the Hunter Valley.

Detective Sergeant Harry Belltree, back on the job after a near-fatal confrontation with corrupt colleagues, has become a departmental embarrassment. The solution is a posting away from Sydney and a quiet life in Newcastle. Or maybe not so quiet. A body’s been found buried just offshore on Ash Island; there may be more. There's also Harry's unfinished business. The car crash that killed his parents and blinded his wife happened not far from Newcastle. And Harry knows it was no accident. The other unfinished business is Jenny's longed-for pregnancy. Which means that now the stakes are higher than ever.

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’. And when he goes off-grid to investigate, that’s when things start to get dangerous. Set in Sydney, this dark, morally ambiguous and adrenaline-charged new series is a triumphant change of direction for Barry Maitland.

This crime thriller, the sixth starring detectives David Brock and Kathy Kolla, is set in the Docklands Islamic community.