AustLit

Stratos Gazis hates being called a hit man. What he is, is a conscientious fixer. He fixes problems that few can fix. Things that people are willing to pay handsomely to get done provided he concludes the targets deserve their fate. 

'The story centers around the blue-eyed orphan Emma, the "baby blue" of the title, a beautiful teenage girl with a talent for card tricks of exceptional sophistication - all the more impressive for her tender years and the blindness that has afflicted her since the age of eight. Emma and her adoptive father, a former investigative journalist, roam the streets of Athens together, earning enough to keep body and soul together by performing Chaplinesque sketches. 

'When the ex-journalist is brutally murdered, Angelino, a well-connected Athenian underworld figure, takes the girl under his wing and retains the services of Stratos to find her father's killers. Meanwhile, Costas Dragas, a top homicide cop and Gazis's best friend, has taken on the investigation of a spate of murders of pedophiles, and as usual, has gone to war with the media. It slowly emerges that their cases intersect and that corporate interests, more powerful than they could ever have imagined, lie behind the murders they both need to solve. 

'Through a combination of experience and the ability to read the ailing city, its residents and its streets with consummate skill, the case is solved, but not without some subliminal tutoring from a great classic of the cinema.'  (Publication summary)

'“So sweet, so calm, so unaffectedly natural… I’d nearly forgotten that the reason she had invited me there was to discuss how I would kill her husband.” 

'Stratos Gazis hates being called a contract killer. What he is, is a conscientious fixer. He fixes problems that are only mentioned in whispers. That very few can fix. Things that people are willing to pay handsomely to get done, without wanting to know about the small stuff - just that the job was carried out. Stratos is their man, provided that his meticulous research shows him that the targets deserve their fate. As he says, “I’m a kind of Robin Hood. I hunt down the villains. And I rob them. Of their lives.” 

'But now, in the midst of the Greek economic crisis and political turmoil, during a melancholy winter which makes life in Athens even more unbearable than usual, this film-noir loving assassin with the strict moral code is about to get involved in the most high-profile case of his contract killer career. He finds himself caught between the most beloved lawyer in Greece, known as “the guardian of the poor”, and his actress and model wife, the most desirable woman in the country. They are both in dire need of his killing services, but which one is telling the truth? 

'Helped by three childhood friends, Costas Dragas, a homicide cop, Teri, a transsexual high-class hooker and Maria, the passion of his life, he discovers that truth, in shattered loves and broken families, is, as ever, a relative thing. '  (Publication summary)

'Tito Ihaka, the unkempt, overweight Maori cop was demoted to Sergeant due to insubordination and pigheadedness. He investigates the unsolved killing of 17 year old girl at an election night party in a ritzy villa near Auckland. Ihaka is also embroiled in a very personal mystery. A freelance journalist has stumbled across information that Ihaka's father Jimmy, a trade union firebrand and renegade Marxist, didn't die of natural causes. The stories weave themselves into an exciting climax in an atmosphere of political manoeuvring and intrigue surrounding the USA's confrontation with New Zealand over its anti-nuclear stance.'

Source : publication summary

'Maori cop Tito Ihaka, “unkempt, overweight, intemperate, unruly, unorthodox and profane “, is a cop unable to play the police politics necessary for promotion, but a man who has a way with women, and he's a stubborn investigator with an uncanny instinct for the truth.
'Ihaka is in the wilderness, having fallen foul of the new regime at Auckland Central. Called back to follow up a strange twist in the unsolved case that got him into trouble in the first place, Ihaka finds himself hunting a shadowy hitman who could have several notches on his belt.
'His enemies want him off the case, but the bodies are piling up. Ihaka embarks on a quest to establish whether police corruption was behind the shooting of an undercover cop and--to complicate matters-- he becomes involved with an enigmatic female suspect who could hold the key to everything.'

Source : publication summary

'A missing two-year-old girl, an unidentified drowning victim, arson, and the threat of murder bring Homicide Squad Inspector Hal Challis of the Mornington Peninsula Police Force and his staff to Bushrangers Bay, an Australian seaside resort outside Melbourne. Allis not idyllic in this resort community—far from it. Cars are stolen and torched; letter boxes are burned; and the Kittyhawk airplane of an attractive aerial photographer suffers malicious damage.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Soho Crime ed.).

'A serial killer is on the loose in a small coastal town near Melbourne, Australia. Detective Inspector Hal Challis and his team must apprehend him before he strikes again. But first, Challis has to contend with the editor of a local newspaper who undermines his investigation at every turn, and with his wife, who attempts to resurrect their marriage through long-distance phone calls from a sanitarium, where she has been committed for the past eight years for attempted murder—his.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Soho Crime ed.).