Murder on the Great Ocean Walk (Ruth Finlay Mysteries Book 4)

A deadly hike along Australia’s most scenic coastline

When Ruth Finlay agrees to join her eccentric neighbour Doris Cleaver on a guided hike along the Great Ocean Walk, she expects rugged beauty, fresh air—and maybe a few awkward moments with strangers. What she doesn’t expect is a murder.

Before the hike even begins, a member of their tour group—comprising trauma survivors from Melbourne—is found dead in her room. While others write it off as misfortune, Doris insists it’s murder. Then, on the first day of the hike, another hiker vanishes.

Battling a relentless case of influenza, Ruth struggles to keep up with both the group and Doris’s offbeat sleuthing. As tensions rise and danger closes in along the treacherous cliffs and tidal beaches, the truth feels more elusive than ever. But when the bodies start adding up, Ruth and Doris must piece together a mystery buried deep in the past—before the killer strikes again.

Murder on the Great Ocean Walk is the fourth gripping instalment in Isobel Blackthorn’s Ruth Finlay Mysteries, where the wild beauty of the Australian coast conceals deadly secrets.

Start reading Murder on the Great Ocean Walk today and uncover what lies beneath the surface.

Excerpt from the book

I pressed my lips together and tried hard not to cough. My throat burned as much as it itched, my head felt fuzzy and my muscles weak. Doris had left me standing beside the luggage while she headed off in the direction of a shop on the next corner. I made sure to watch her enter. Not the best start to our trip. Not with her propensity for disappearing. But she was buying me a packet of cough lozenges. Surely, this early on our trip, she wouldn’t do one of her disappearing acts. If she did, I knew I wouldn’t be up to mounting a search with two suitcases and two backpacks. She knew where I was. She could come and find me.

The air on that sunny, late-August day was unusually warm and still, the ocean a resplendent sapphire, the water in the bay almost glassy. With the sun behind me warming my back, I took in the neatly landscaped foreshore, the expanse of coastline beyond, the hilly hinterland. Apollo Bay was such a pretty town.

Somewhere in that hinterland, the road we had just travelled coursed through farmland of vast green fields blanketing the barely undulating land all the way back to Myrtle Bay. Here in Apollo Bay, the setting was tranquil, orderly, pleasing to the eye. As though to reinforce that sense of order, the bus had dropped us off near the Anglican church. Not a grand church but old, its walls of white weatherboard having withstood every storm the Southern Ocean had thrown at it during its lifetime.

I was already regretting catching that bus. Ciaran, my handyman-turned-boyfriend, had offered to drive us, but I had refused his offer with a kiss and a smile. He had a lot of work on, and the bus took us straight to Apollo Bay, and in not much more time than it would have taken to drive.

We were joining an organised hiking tour of the Great Ocean Walk, which followed the coastline back towards the Twelve Apostles, where Ciaran would be picking us up in ten days. That meant ten days with Doris and the eight other tour participants, plus the guide and driver of the minibus. Just ten days. What could go wrong?

I was only on the tour after the success of my Yackandandah feature last month. My editor Sharon was keen for another. I was keen to address a cutting letter to the editor that Sharon had received but hadn’t published, a letter accusing me of shallow research after I had failed to include any Indigenous history in my piece on Cape Bridgewater. On this tour, I planned on addressing the matter. I knew if I was to do the theme justice, I needed to lead with an appreciation of trauma, trauma occurring not all that long ago, trauma that demanded some kind of remembering. Trouble was, I had no clear idea how I would go about summarising something as weighty as that, especially in my current unwell state, even if this was the perfect opportunity.