Murder of Convenience (Georgia West Mysteries Book 2)

Buried secrets. Political privilege. One tragic family.

Gawler Street is under pressure. Leading Senior Constable Georgia West is barely holding her team together under a volatile new boss, Senior Sergeant Brett Gresham. His erratic behaviour threatens to derail every investigation—until the discovery of a long-dead family in a demolished factory changes everything.

As more bodies turn up—including a murdered ex-mob hitman and a young woman with no ID—Georgia is convinced the deaths are connected. But the links are buried deep in the past, tied to organised crime, lost identities, and political power that reaches higher than anyone expected. With her team fracturing and trust in short supply, Georgia races to uncover the truth before the killer silences the last witnesses.

Murder of Convenience is the gripping second book in the Georgia West Mysteries, where secrets don't stay hidden and justice doesn’t come easy.

Read now and uncover what should have stayed buried.

Excerpt from the book

The present

Leading Senior Constable Georgia West had been to a lot of retirement parties in her twenty-two years on the force but this was the first time she’d ever felt sadness at seeing the party boy leave. Usually, such celebrations marked an opportunity. One more senior officer gone meant one more vacant spot opening up for an ambitious woman waiting in the wings. Georgia had made good use of these opportunities, making her rise in the ranks almost seamless; a superintendent at thirty-seven. Almost unheard of for a woman in the police force.

She smiled as a roar went up and a pink-faced, grinning Graham Causton, her boss for the last fifteen months, accepted his reward from his current and past co-workers. A gold watch was the official recognition for his long and faithful service but there was another, a leather-bound photo album collated by his current team.

As he looked around the room after opening the carefully wrapped parcel, Georgia suspected the glint in his eyes was not the result of the flashing camera lights. When he caught her eye, he saluted her with a wink. The rest of the rookie team who had brought down one of the world’s worst serial killers followed his gaze and saluted her as well. She ducked her head to hide her own glinting eyes. Gratitude didn’t come easy to Georgia West.

A year and a half ago she was watching her immediate superior, an elderly commander, nodding and smiling at those wishing him out of the place as fast as he could go. At least half a dozen of them were lining up for his spot, though most knew that Georgia West was a certainty for the job; a triumph for a girl from the slums. All her rivals knew that Georgia West was headed for the stratosphere. Commissioner was not beyond the realms of possibility. She had the right personality for it, too. You didn’t have to be likeable to reach the top, just efficient. And she was.

Now she was a leading senior constable, back near the bottom of the heap, laughing as a teammate shoved a drink into one hand and a soggy canapé into the other. The only dampener was apprehension over who would take their beloved old boss’s place. They were all men, senior sergeants who ranged in age from forty-one to fifty-two which meant none of them were highflyers. A backwater precinct in a run-down slum wasn’t a prime promotion placement. It was likely that any candidates were only being moved sideways from some other rundown slum or promoted from a small country station.

Any way you looked at it, a younger version of Graham, and probably nowhere near as pleasant, was the best they could expect.

Georgia’s own expectations had collapsed when her investigation of a huge corruption case disintegrated in a transcendental cock-up. Witnesses changed their stories, files disappeared, banks and the money launderers closed ranks. Her colleagues looked at her as if she had betrayed them, but she knew she’d done nothing wrong. And nobody claimed she was corrupt, just incompetent. It was soon clear to Georgia that she’d been sabotaged and only one person could have done it.