It’s an interesting choice of location Disher has made. Beach locations do tend to attract some very nasty criminal activity, and this one is no exception. Nearly twenty years ago, two elderly women disappeared while waiting for a bus in Frankston; the psychopath Paul Denyer committed his grisly murders there; then there was the horrific abduction/ murder of Sheree Beasley at Rosebud. The disappearance of Sarah McDiarmid is still on the books. Then there are the serial rapists, flashers and perverts who lurk around campsite toilet blocks every summer. None of this is lost on Disher, who makes full use of the region’s darker potential in The Dragon Man. Local sensitivities are partly protected, however, by a judicious mix of real and invented place names.

It’s a hot December, just before Christmas – a time for drunken revellers, car thieves, rampaging hoons, break-ins: the full gamut of petty and not-so petty offences that keep police busy during the holidays. But for Challis and his team there’s something much more sinister to deal with: a woman’s body has been found, and now a second woman has vanished from the streets. A serial killer is working the Old Peninsula Highway, and he has to be caught in a hurry. Disher presents the reader with a convincingly detailed local scenario, in the style of Ruth Rendell’s Kingsmark, or Colin Dexter’s Oxford. There are likely lads, tradesmen, a persistent journalist, a cop with a chip on his shoulder, dodgy citizens, an unscrupulous lawyer, a gypsy – and so it goes.

With an array of suspects at hand Challis ploughs through the leads, and although the investigation throws up solutions to other matters, he doesn’t seem to be getting any closer to the killer. But in his customarily devious fashion, Disher tosses in a tantalising clue or two, such as a stolen backpack that keeps changing hands. It’s an intriguing, coolly written narrative, and Challis himself is an enigma. The Dragon Rapide – an old warplane he is restoring – is both pastime and solace, and the Peninsula he regards as his port in a storm, after a traumatic chapter in his life. We don’t know what this means exactly, but it certainly has a lot to do with frequent phone calls from his ex-wife, who we learn is in jail for trying to have him killed. The Dragon Man sets a hight standard for what looks like a terrific new series in the making.

Peter Temple hasn’t been around for long, but he has made a big splash with Bad Debts, featuring lawyer/debt collector/finder of missing persons Jack Irish, and An Iron Rose – another regional crime novel, set in the Ballarat area. In Black Tide, Irish is back, this time looking for the missing son of his late father’s old mate. The son, Gary Connors, is a no-account ex-cop who has absconded with a swag of his father’s cash. Irish follows Connors’ trail into a very dark, secret and extremely lethal world, and it isn’t long before his life is on the line. At the heart of the matter there is a mega-wealthy tycoon, one Steven Levesque, whose operation includes money laundering on a massive, worldwide scale. Irish’s mates – a ‘can-do’ fixer, a senior cop, a lawyer, a retired jockey turned professional punter – are there to lend a hand when required, which is often.

This is a highly complex and magnificently crafted thriller from a top-drawer practitioner. To my mind Temple has the magic touch: he is deft, dry, sharp-eyed, inventive. And Irish himself, like Hal Challis, is a man with plenty of baggage. When he is not plotting racetrack plunges, sinking pots and lamenting the death of the Fitzroy Football Club with his barfly mates in the Prince of Prussia, his solace is cabinetmaking, which he carries on in an old Collingwood factory under the tutelage of a master craftsman. He is a battered, burnt-out case, but somehow, he manages to press on, even when nameless government agents are trying to kill him.

Black Tide is certainly compulsive, but Temple’s laconic, utterly natural style and his instinctive command of the genre elevates it to a level well above the standard Six Days of the Condor-style paranoia thriller. Temple is the business.