Winner of the inaugural CAL Scribe Fiction Prize for writers 35 and over, A Darker Music is a gripping mystery that takes the reader into the heart of rural Western Australia, and into one family's troubled past.

When Mary Lanyon takes on the job of temporary housekeeper at Downe, a famous Merino stud, she is looking forward to staying in a gracious homestead with the wealthy Hazlitt family. The owner's wife, Clio, has been ill, and Mary's task is to get the house back into shape in the lead-up to the wedding of the only son and heir, Martin.

When she arrives, however, Mary realises things are not right. Clio Hazlitt rarely ventures from her room. The house is shabby, redolent of dust and secrets. As a friendship develops between the women, Mary discovers answers to the questions that have puzzled her: What is the nature of Clio's illness? What has caused the grim estrangement between Clio and her husband? And why did Clio give up playing music, when she says it meant so much to her?

Vienna, 1903: Thirty-three-year-old Marta Mueller, natural historian and talented artist, meets Bernard Schmidt, a copra planter from German East Neuguinea (now Papua New Guinea) who is looking for a wife. For Marta, who longs to travel the world, Bernard is a window of opportunity and a chance to start anew. A few months later Marta is married and sailing for the Pacific. Her new husband's friends are a strange group: Australians, Samoans, Europeans and natives mix uneasily and unconventionally in the hot, humid, and unstable environment of German-ruled Neuguinea. Marta must find her feet, and herself, far away from her family during her marriage and, later, the British-Australian conquest and formation of Papua New Guinea. Eventually, Marta finds a real, if unconventional love, and achieves greater success in her artistic and scientific work than she might ever have dreamed.

Kelly Ana Morey is an award-winning novelist of Ngati Kuri and Pakeha descent. Born in 1968, she spent her early childhood in Papua New Guinea before attending boarding school in New Zealand. She graduated from Auckland with degrees in art history and creative writing, and wrote her first novel, Bloom, while unemployed in the Far North. She now lives in South Kaipara. Morey's previous novels include Bloom (Hubert Church Award: Best First Work of Fiction 2004) and Grace is Gone (Finalist Kiriyama Pacific Rim Fiction Prize 2004). She was also the inaugural recipient of the Janet Frame Literary Award for Fiction in 2005.

Jayne Keeney is a fiesty thirty-something Aussie who has been living in Bangkok for many years. She has been hired to investigate the alleged suicide of a young Australian woman in a seedy Thai coastal town. Maryanne Delbeck was happy and harmless, and her father refuses to believe she took her own life. Jayne immerses herself in the case, navigating the backstreet world of Thai ladyboys, monks, strippers, expats and corrupt officials.

Maryanne's death is not the only mystery awaiting Jayne among Pattaya's neon signs and go-go bars. While working undercover at the orphanage where Maryanne volunteered, Jayne discovers something far more sinister. Now her life is in danger, her case is still unsolved and she barely has time for dinner with her handsome new love interest, Rajiv. With love and death both circling, Jayne now has two cases to crack and very little time to do it. The Half-Child is not your standard crime novel, and Jayne Keeney is not your everyday detective.

Angela Savage travelled to Laos on a six-month scholarship in 1992 and ended up staying in Asia for six years. She was based in Vientiane, then Hanoi and Bangkok where she set up and headed the Australian Red Cross HIV/AIDS subregional program. Her love affair with Asia continues and she has returned many times since. Behind the Night Bazaar won the 2004 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. Angela lives in Melbourne.

Small towns harbour secrets. Rising, receding and returning like the tides lapping the fictional coastal town of Kinsale, the stories in this collection revolve around Alice and Grace, friends since childhood, who grow to live vastly different lives.

Weaving in and around these women is a lattice of interconnecting stories drawing in their husbands, families, neighbours and strangers, each linked to one another by fate or circumstance. Having Cried Wolf is a contemplative and affecting collection—one that marks the arrival of an original literary talent.

Gretchen Shirm currently lives in Sydney where she works as a lawyer. In 2009, Gretchen received the D.J. O'Hearn Memorial Fellowship for Emergent Writers. She holds a Master of Creative Writing from the University of Sydney. Her fiction has been published in numerous literary journals. Having Cried Wolf is her first collection.