Autumn Maze

From the award-winning Jon Cleary, a novel featuring Sydney detective Scobie Malone. When the Sydney Police Minister’s son dies, Malone is caught in a maelstrom of politics, money, murder, and power.

When the Sydney police minister’s son falls twenty floors to his death, the politics of murder ripple the city like a boulder into a pool.

Caught in the wash is Detective Inspector Scobie Malone, as he uncovers an elaborate financial scheme, a series of cold-blooded precision killings, and layers of political intrigue.

Scobie thinks he is immune to politics, but he is soon engulfed in its consequences: the police minister applies pressure, a millionaire banker becomes less than his public image, a hit man goes about his grisly work, and three of Sydney’s most powerful (and libidinous) women give Scobie a glimpse of how life in Sydney really operates.

Finally, when he is forced to accept aid from his onetime enemy, top criminal Jack Aldwych, now retired but still ruthless, Malone learns once again that when politics and money are arrayed against him, the odds are never even.

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.