Murder with Malice (Georgia West Mysteries Book 1)

A Killer from the Past. A Case That Could Redeem Her.

Georgia West was once a rising star in the Melbourne police force—until scandal brought her crashing down. Now posted to a forgotten precinct on the edge of the city she once escaped, she's just trying to keep her head down. But when a young woman is murdered right outside the station, Georgia sees a chance to claw her way back.

To everyone else, the crime looks like a one-off. To Georgia, it looks familiar—too familiar. The details echo the unsolved murder of her own sister nearly three decades earlier. As she digs deeper, a chilling link to her past emerges, and the case becomes personal.

With a reluctant team behind her and a pathologist with demons of his own, Georgia finds herself hunting a killer who’s been hiding in plain sight. But trust is dangerous—and so is the man who claims to be on her side.

Fast-paced, layered, and emotionally charged, Murder With Malice is the gripping first installment in the Georgia West Mysteries by Deirdre Oliver.

Start the series today and follow Georgia West into the darkest corners of justice and revenge.

Excerpt from the book

2025

Georgia West slapped at the old-fashioned alarm clock that shrieked in her ear. She hauled the thin duvet over her head and rolled over to face the wall. Plain beige paint. New, the agent had said. Yeah, one coat over the 1980s orange ten years ago.

Then she remembered. Today was her fortieth birthday — the end of her youth and the first day of her middle age. Luckily nobody knew, and if they did, they didn’t care. At least she would be spared the insincere greetings that strangers dumped on you thinking they were being kind. How was it kind to remind someone that they had left promise behind as they faced the downhill road to death?

She groaned. How did she get into this mess? Forty, single and in debt. Too poor to afford anything more than this dismal hole euphemistically called a studio apartment — a room with a hotplate, and a bathroom so small she had to climb over the toilet to get into the shower.

Her only furniture was a sagging sofa, a narrow bed in an alcove, a stained plywood table and one vinyl-covered chrome chair with the stuffing showing at the corners. The single window looked out onto a crumbling, soot covered brick wall that lined the grungiest alleyway in the dirtiest, most run-down old suburb in Melbourne. The local rodents were the size of Dobermans and the graffiti was so bad that she had considered paying some taggers to come and liven the place up.

But now she was back on the bloody beat, she could barely afford to eat, let alone bribe kids with spray cans. She gritted her teeth, ruminating yet again over her fall from grace. Her entire career in shreds. Twenty-one years of meticulous hard work, gone. Along with her relationship with Alex which had vanished with her dive to the bottom.

No surprise there since he had orchestrated it. Not that she realised it back then. Not until it was too late. She felt ill when she remembered how easily she’d been dazzled when this handsome, clever man chose her, Georgie West, to be his lover. How flattered she was by his pride in her career, in his boasting to everyone about his superintendent girlfriend who had greater things to come.

She railed at her stupidity in not noticing how he acted as if her promotion two years earlier was a feather in his cap. At how she’d basked in being one of the golden couple while he quietly sabotaged the massive case she was working on taking her career with it.

With her out of the way, a scandal scarred, lowly constable, he was elevated to commander, the promotion that was supposed to be hers. Instead she was here … in this shabby backwater suburb, where even the crime was second rate.

She ground her teeth, misery giving way to rage, her usual response to setbacks that had slipped lately. Every morning she went through the same ritual — depression, self-pity, then fury. It was the fury that got her out of bed. It did now. She flipped the switch on her one and only indulgence — the flash coffee machine she had sneaked out of their apartment. She had figured he wouldn’t be petty enough to demand she return it. He wasn’t — he wouldn’t risk having the thing rammed up his arse. Even that didn’t help her mood much as she reached across the ancient, permanently shit-stained toilet to turn on the shower.