Book Covers By Garrick Jones

Word Count: Click here to reveal134000 (Click here to hide)

Character Identities: Click here to revealGay (Click here to hide)

Summary: Clyde’s idyllic afternoon in the surf with his mates is interrupted by the news that there’s been a quadruple suicide in an apartment overlooking the beach. Two of the deceased are the parents of Barry Wilkinson, one of Clyde’s childhood friends, a man he hasn’t seen since Clyde donned the khaki and left for war. Wilkinson engages Clyde to discover the identity of a mysterious woman who has been left a huge sum of money in his father’s will. On the surface, what appears to be a straightforward case evolves into a complex story of deception, lies, violence and murder. Relationships are tested, new ones formed and Clyde discovers that those connections that seem unrelated are closely linked behind a veil of secrecy. The early summer of 1957 is a time in which Clyde nearly loses everything he holds dear—his own life included—all because of two couples who died while playing bridge at the beach.

Word Count: Click here to reveal127000 (Click here to hide)

Character Identities: Click here to revealGay (Click here to hide)

Summary: From the deserts of North Africa to the dark forests in the Third Reich, Tommy Haupner, together with his American lover, Henry "Shorty" Reiter, lead their team in a daring mission to rescue a gifted young savant from Nazi Germany's T4 euthanasia program. They are forced to flee in a stolen bus in the dead of night across enemy territory with a precious cargo of 24 handicapped children destined for extermination. In a supreme effort to save their charges and to avoid capture and execution themselves, they mount the most daring and dangerous rescue mission possible, the results of which almost end in disaster. This third book in The Seventh of December series is an action-packed wartime adventure set in the early months of 1942. Stolen aircraft, kidnapped senior Nazi officials, doctors of death and bloody revenge massacres, all of which are intertwined with the love of a helpless, rescued child. Farewell, My Boy, deals with not only the frailty of men's hearts, but the truth that even the bravest are not exempt from the pain of loss, even when it is for a greater good.

Word Count: Click here to reveal18000 (Click here to hide)

Character Identities: Click here to revealGay (Click here to hide)

Summary: In 1947, James “Jimmy” Bacon becomes involved in a violent workplace altercation fuelled by a PTSD-induced rage. His boss, a fellow war-veteran, tells him to take a few months off work, have a holiday, go somewhere warm, and get his head together.   Jimmy decides to take a coastal steamer to the northernmost outpost of Australia, Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory, to visit the grave of his oldest friend, Sandy, killed during the Japanese bombing of the city in 1942. Upon arriving, he discovers that Sandy’s death is not as simple as military records seemed to indicate. After learning that Sandy’s grave contains only an arm with no distinguishing features, he starts asking questions around town in order to find out what really happened to his mate.   The more he asks, the more he discovers that Darwin is less about post-war reconstruction and more about drugs, gambling, and the excessive consumption of alcohol. It’s a lawless city where 95% of the population is male and prostitution is banned, creating a thriving underworld where rough frontier-town blokes and men from the armed forces are doing more with each other than having a beer and passing the time of day.   While digging deeper, Jimmy discovers a terrible truth, arousing the interest of men who would do anything to keep the past a secret—men who consider his life of little value. Jimmy is forced to rely on quick thinking and his army training when death comes looking for him in the dead of night.

Word Count: Click here to reveal125000 (Click here to hide)

Character Identities: Click here to revealGay (Click here to hide)

Summary: Intelligencers: men and women from all walks of life and from all sections of society, servants of the Crown who work for the Home Office gathering information vital to the security of the nation. London, 1855. While Great Britain is at war with the Russians in the Crimea, a cadre of disaffected seditionists and insurrectionists, made up of members of the aristocracy and wealthy industrialists, have set a plan into action that’s been decades in the making—a plan that aims to overthrow the Queen and to install a puppet king on the throne in her place. With the war raging and disquiet in the industrial north and in Ireland, their perfidious plot, unless stopped, threatens to bring about anarchy and revolution. Aware of the imminent danger, Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, has tasked The Brothers, a band of four men, friends of over twenty years, to root out the source of the infection, destroy the clique, and track down and eradicate its foreign pretender by any means necessary. From molly houses to state banquets, from hospitals to steam baths, from aristocratic households to the meanest of slums, the friends find themselves in a succession of increasingly perilous situations. Like the mighty Thames, undercurrents flow swift and deep as they uncover plot after plot and treachery and treason in abundance.

Word Count: Click here to reveal135000 (Click here to hide)

Character Identities: Click here to revealGay (Click here to hide)

Summary: “I’m sorry I have to tell you this, Harry, but Daley Morrison was murdered. It was no heart attack. He was stabbed through the heart and then staked out, naked, in the middle of the Sydney Cricket Ground as some sort of warning to someone.” Harry Jones almost fell into his chair, such was his shock. Clyde Smith is brought into the investigation by his former colleague, Sam Telford, after a note is found in the evidence bags with Clyde’s initials on it. Someone wants ex-Detective Sergeant Smith to investigate the crime from outside the police force. It can only mean one thing—corruption at the highest levels. The Cricketer’s Arms is an old-fashioned, pulp fiction detective novel, set in beachside Sydney in 1956. It follows the intricacies of a complex murder case, involving a tight-knit group of queer men, sports match-fixing, and a criminal drug cartel. Was Daley Morrison killed because of his sexual proclivities, or was his death a signal to others to tread carefully? Has Clyde Smith been fingered as the man for the case, or will the case be the end of the road for the war veteran detective?

Word Count: Click here to reveal144000 (Click here to hide)

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Summary: Halloran pulled the sheet down to the man’s waist. What I saw made me take a deep breath: the man’s throat was cut so deeply his head looked like it had almost been severed. “If you tell me this man was found in the public toilet behind the grandstand of Coogee Oval opposite where I live, I might just need a chair,” I said.   Clyde Smith’s quiet, happy life, in love for the first time, working as a private detective and journalist, is suddenly thrown into disarray by the appearance, after a three year hiatus, of a body bearing the distinctive hallmarks of a string of murders he hadn’t been able to solve when working in homicide. Forced to cooperate with the new detective sergeant who’d taken his place in the local cop shop, Clyde has to not only deal with the enormous chip on the young man’s shoulder, but also with a complex case that involves kidnapping, the re-emergence of the Silent Cop Killer, the historical abuse of young men and boys in orphanages across the State, and a ghost from the past who is out for revenge. Will Clyde and the new DS be able to find the killer before he finds them? Or will they be his final prize, the last victims in his string of grisly murders? Perhaps only the local psychic, owner of a Romany religious statue, the Gilded Madonna, can provide the clue that might ultimately solve the puzzle, but which will also lead Clyde and DS Dioli into mortal danger.

Word Count: Click here to reveal138000 (Click here to hide)

Character Identities: Click here to revealGay (Click here to hide)

Summary: “I swear to God it was Willoughby. My brother stood not two feet away from me, called me Lina to my face, and pulled Harley into his arms, saying he was sorry, sobbing, and calling him his boy.”   An apparition in Sydney’s fruit and vegetable market leaves the mother of one of Clyde’s best friends believing that her brother, hanged for murder twenty-four years beforehand, has somehow risen from the grave and confronted her. She is adamant that the visitation was real and visits Clyde asking him to investigate the mass murder her brother was supposed to have committed. She believes he was either set up or was covering for someone else’s crime. Could this vision have been a folie à deux, a delusional vision shared by both mother or son? As Clyde investigates, clues lead him to one of Australia’s most famous silent screen actors, a man who, together with his murdered father, becomes intrinsically linked to the mass murder, known as The Killing at Candal Creek. Wheels within wheels, lies, extortion, and coverups lead Clyde to a bloody confrontation on a deserted beach in the tropics. This time, it’s not only his own life at risk but also that of one of his most valued and closest friends.

Word Count: Click here to reveal115000 (Click here to hide)

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Summary: Warrambool In Gamilaraay, the language of the Kamilaroi peoples of north-western New South Wales, it's the word for The Milky Way. It's also the name of Peter Dixon's homestead and sheep station, situated in the lee of the Liverpool Ranges. In 1947, Peter returns from war, his parents and younger brother dead, the property de-stocked and his older brother, Ron, having emptied out the family bank account and nowhere to be found. The House With a Thousand Stairs is the story of a young man, scarred both on the inside and the outside, trying to re-establish what once was a prosperous and thriving sheep station with the help of his neighbours and his childhood friend, Frank Hunter, the local Indigenous policeman. Enveloped by the world of Indigenous spirituality, the Kamilaroi system of animal guides and totems, Peter and Frank discover the true nature of their predestined friendship, one defined by the stars, the ancestral spirits, and Baiame, the Creator God and Sky Father of The Dreaming. Maliyan bandaarr, maliyan biliirr.

Word Count: Click here to reveal135000 (Click here to hide)

Character Identities: Click here to revealGay (Click here to hide)

Summary: “Please donate generously to Mrs. Roosevelt’s charity. Every penny raised from this series of concerts along the eastern coast of the United States will help with the resettlement and care of child refugees from war-torn continental Europe.” Over dinner with J Edgar Hoover in Washington, Tommy Haupner is shocked to learn that his forgotten and empty Swiss bank account has been topped up regularly with staggering sums of money … deposits that originate in Nazi Germany. Could this bank account have something to do with anonymous letters posted to him at home in London, their contents a single blank slip of paper on which are written two words: NAZI GOLD? When he returns to Britain, he soon discovers that not only is his own life in danger but also those of his nearest and dearest who become pawns in a savage game of revenge.

Word Count: Click here to reveal140000 (Click here to hide)

Character Identities: Click here to revealGay (Click here to hide)

Summary: Two years after finishing his tour of duty in the Occupational Forces in Japan, Damson O'Reilly arrives in Siena, Italy. Sight-unseen at a local auction, he buys an abandoned Tuscan farmhouse in which he aims to write, paint, and start a new life. The house, passed over at auction, becomes an impulse buy when it's put up for a final time. He's prepared for a semi-ruin, happy to turn his hand to renovating the house - however, what he's totally unprepared for are three dead bodies, one of which he stumbles over when he arrives at La Mensola, the name of his isolated farmhouse on the road between Siena and Montepulciano. Against the backdrop of a series of grisly murders, The Road to Montepulciano is the story of a young man, still suffering the scars of war, who, despite betrayal of trust and surrounded by a complex web of lies, finds friendship, love and the warmth of community.

Word Count: Click here to reveal128000 (Click here to hide)

Character Identities: Click here to revealGay (Click here to hide)

Summary: As bombs rain down over London during the Blitz, Major Tommy Haupner negotiates the rubble-filled streets of Bloomsbury on his way to perform at a socialite party. The explosive event of the evening is not his virtuosic violin playing, but the 'almost-blond' American who not only insults him, but then steals his heart. The Seventh of December follows a few months in the lives of two Intelligence agents in the early part of World War Two. Set against the backdrop of war-torn occupied Europe, Tommy and his American lover, Henry Reiter, forge a committed relationship that is intertwined with intrigues that threaten the integrity of the British Royal Family and the stability of a Nation at war. Neither bombs nor bullets manage to break the bond that these men form in their struggle against Nazism and the powers of evil.

Word Count: Click here to reveal128000 (Click here to hide)

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Summary: You can never judge an academic book by its cover. Simon Dyson, a quiet assistant professor, is a man of hidden depths. To the world he presents as a harmless, innocuous, shy and retiring intellectual. However, the man who lurks behind that public persona is far more interesting … and dangerous … and driven. 'Wheelchair' is a slow-burn contemporary psychological crime thriller about a man who suffers from both OCD and PTSD, a man who is unwittingly caught up in a cross-border war between rival crime gangs—a conflict that almost leads to his death, and more than once. It's a study of compulsion and of disability, and of the many faces of emotional dependence and sexual compulsion. It’s about how some men cannot just love or make love because their hearts or their bodies lead them to it, but who can only connect emotionally and physically through self-imposed rituals which involve struggle or self-abasement.

Word Count: Click here to reveal127000 (Click here to hide)

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Summary: “There’s no deal unless you tell me who killed Lucretia, Thomas! For the love of God, I have to know—” “She was shot by an assassin.” “But who was this assassin? Who shot her?” he demanded again angrily, leaning forward over the table. “I did,” I said, after a suitably dramatic pause. He threw his head back and laughed loudly, his arms crossed on his chest. “You?” he said once he’d regained his breath. “You? Thomas Haupner, the violinist? The would-be army officer from some stupid, derelict relic of the British Empire, a trained assassin?” After returning from a secret mission in occupied France for His Royal Highness, George, the Duke of Kent, Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Haupner is looking forward to a cup of tea, a hot bath, and the sleepy head of his American lover, Major Henry Reiter on his shoulder when he wakes up the next morning. However, along with items Tommy has recovered for the duke, he has also discovered a secret stash of documents, which, when opened, prove to be a poisoned chalice. Tommy and Shorty find themselves caught up in a dangerous web of lies, enemy agents, assassins, and traitors. In an effort to save the reputations of not only their friends, but men and women high in both society and in the government, they themselves become victims of I.K.S., a former World War One international extortion ring, which has risen, phoenix-like, from the ashes of bomb-devastated London.