Death Knock

They call it the death knock. Three soft raps on a door, and time splits - before and after, heartbeat and absence.

Detective Sergeant Mara Quinn knows the ritual. She has stood on hundreds of doorsteps, delivered the words no one should ever have to say, and carried the weight of those moments home. But the death knock she delivered in 2011 - to a woman named Diane Vance in a Melbourne suburb - has never stopped haunting her. Because the body she identified as Julian Vance was not Julian Vance. She raised her concerns. She was transferred to the small ranges town of Harrow Creek. She was told to stop asking questions.

She never stopped asking them. She just learned to ask quietly.

Twelve years later, a dying man walks into Mara's station with her old case number written on his palm. He whispers five words before he dies: you should have knocked twice. Within hours, the cover-up that ended Mara's city career begins to surface - and it runs deeper than she ever imagined. The trail leads into Sherbrooke Forest, through the wreckage of a land corruption conspiracy spanning decades, and straight to the people who buried the truth and silenced everyone who found it.

Including the brother of her constable, Ryan Beckett, who died in that forest four years ago and was never properly mourned.

Set against the mist-covered ridges and ancient mountain ash of Victoria's Dandenong Ranges, Death Knock is a literary thriller about institutional betrayal, the quiet devastation of carrying other people's grief, and one detective's reckoning with a lie she was made complicit in - and the knock she has been waiting twelve years to deliver.

Perfect for fans of Jane Harper's The Dry, Peter Temple's The Broken Shore and Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad.