From the bestselling author of The Girl on the Page and The Lessons comes the crime thriller, ​The Amateur's Guide to Killing Bad Guys. Available 1st September 2026.

​The Amateur's Guide to Killing Bad Guys
Pre-Order From Your Favourite Bookshop Today


About the Book:


Successful entrepreneur Matthew Burton is having the worst day of his life. The deal of a lifetime flops, his own board is trying to sack him and his daughter wants him cancelled. But things are about to get much, much worse.

Investigative journalist Tamara Morgan thinks she’s on the brink of bringing down a corrupt politician, but her nose is leading her to something much bigger. And much more dangerous.

At a party at the Sydney Opera House, Burton mistakenly picks up a thumb drive intended for Tamara naming those responsible for the collapse of a newly built fifteen-storey apartment block that killed twenty-six residents. Suddenly, corrupt politicians, drug dealers and hired thugs all want Burton and Tamara silenced, for good.

Burton’s a businessman, not an investigator. He’s never even held a gun. But the untrained, outgunned and overwrought Matthew Burton discovers that there is one thing he has a natural aptitude for - causing carnage. 

If Burton can just accept Tamara’s help, they both might get out of this alive.

Available from 1st September 2026
Pre-Order Now: ​​
The Lessons
Out Now in Print, eBook and Audiobook
From the bestselling author of The Girl on the Page comes The Lessons a striking and powerful story about the loss of innocence and how much we can forgive - if we forgive.
Brimming with love, lust and lies.
I read it in a single sitting.
​Best enjoyed with a martini’
Felicity Mclean, Author Of
​the Van Apfel Girls Are Gone
​

The Girl on the Page
Out Now


​'In The Girl on the Page, John Purcell triumphs with a scalpel in one hand and his heart in the other. It is a gripping, dark comedy of a novel which eviscerates the cynicism of contemporary publishing while uttering a cri du coeur for what is happening to writers and
readers this century.

​
Through this black comedy - I squealed with laughter, page after page - flash questions about cultural life that Purcell asks but leaves us to ponder.'

Blanche d'Alpuget