Dilemma

From the award-winning Jon Cleary, a novel featuring Sydney detective Scobie Malone. The routine arrest of a fugitive leads to disturbing allegations against a Crown Prosecutor, and the abduction of a child model reveals an ugly side to the world of fashion.

When Scobie Malone returns to the bush town of Collamundra to apprehend a husband who disappeared after the murder of his wife four years earlier, it seems a cut-and-dried case. But as the trial begins, a key witness recognizes a face in the courtroom, and Scobie finds himself investigating the Crown Prosecutor – an individual revered by colleagues as the perfect family man and a pillar of the community.

Meanwhile, Sydney is agog at the abduction of a child model whose freckled face has launched a thousand products. Malone, like everyone else, finds it hard to take the threat seriously – until a body is found. As a devoted father, Scobie is shaken by the murder of a child, but his inquiries reveal that the family life little Lucybelle experienced was a million miles from the settled existence of the Malones.

Suddenly Malone is embroiled in two cases where, the deeper he probes, the more he wishes he hadn’t. And, having uncovered the truth, he must decide whether to proceed – knowing that if he does, a family will be destroyed.

Reviews

PRAISE FOR JON CLEARY:

'When the ruminants and the lucre-chasers are growing lichen on library shelves Jon Cleary will continue to be read'
LOS ANGELES TIMES

'Enough plot twists and conspiracy-making ingredients to satisfy the most demanding aficionado of the genre'
IRISH TIMES

‘The business of a novelist is to tell a story. Jon Cleary has that talent in abundance’ SUNDAY EXPRESS

‘The Malone stories come alive through their setting … Cleary’s writing is seamless and his plots imaginative and mature’ MIAMI HERALD

‘Cleary is a national literary institution… If Australia has a crime writer who deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as Ed McBain, Ruth Rendell, and P.D James, then it is Cleary’ SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

About the author

Jon Cleary, who died in July 2010, was the author of over fifty novels, including The High Commissioner, which was the first in a popular detective fiction series featuring Sydney Police Inspector Scobie Malone. In 1996 he was awarded the Inaugural Ned Kelly Award for his lifetime contribution to crime fiction in Australia. His last novel, FOUR-CORNERED CIRLCE, was published in 2007.