Showing results by narrator "Barton Welch" in All Categories

A suspect covered in blood, without a memory of how it got there. A murder committed without setting foot inside the room where it happens. And an advent calendar. Because, you know, it's Christmas.

When the Australian Mystery Writers' Society invited me to their crime-writing festival aboard the Ghan, the famous train between Darwin and Adelaide, I was hoping for some inspiration for my second book. And I needed a break from real people killing each other. Obviously, that didn't pan out. The program is a who's who of crime writing royalty: the debut writer (me!), the forensic science writer, the blockbuster writer, the legal thriller writer, the literary writer and the psychological suspense writer. But when one of us is murdered, six authors quickly turn into five detectives.

I was dreading the Cunningham family reunion even before the first murder. Before the storm stranded us at the mountain resort. The thing is, us Cunninghams don't really get along. We've only got one thing in common: we've all killed someone. My brother, my step-sister, my wife, my father, my mother, my sister-in-law, my uncle, my step-father, my aunt. Even me. When they find the first body in the snow, it's clear that only a Cunningham could have committed the crime—and it's up to me to prove it. There are plenty of killers in my family. But only one murderer.

Most of us have done our time in the retail trenches, but service stations are undoubtedly the frontline, as Melburnian David Goodwin found out when he started working the weekend graveyard shift at his local servo. From his very first night shift, David absorbed a consistent level of mind-bending lunacy, encountering everything from giant shoplifting bees and balaclava-clad goons hurling cordial-filled water bombs from the sunroof of their BMW, to anarcho-goths high on MDMA releasing large rats into the store from their matching Harry Potter backpacks.