Kate Hayes Books in Order
The complete Kate Hayes series by Phillip Strang — all 6 Australian thrillers in reading order
Detective Sergeant Kate Hayes works the vast, unforgiving country of outback South Australia — the opal fields, the salt lakes, the drought-stricken stations — where isolation hides as much as the red dust does. What begins as a run of remote outback murders slowly widens into something far larger: a government conspiracy that will cost Kate her career, and nearly her life. Across six books she rises through the ranks and pays for every truth she uncovers, in a series that moves from classic outback noir into full-blown conspiracy thriller. Perfect for fans of Jane Harper, Chris Hammer, and Garry Disher.
Kate Hayes Series — All Books in Order
1. The Red Dust
The plane crashed forty years ago. The body inside died yesterday. Detective Sergeant Kate Hayes is called to a remote crash site near Coober Pedy expecting wreckage and old bones — and finds a fresh corpse: a man in a 1980s RAAF flight suit, carrying ID for a pilot declared dead in 1984. The plane has been buried in red dust for decades, but the victim was alive until now, and someone kept him that way. As Kate works through military records and classified files, she uncovers a Cold War programme the government never acknowledged — one that turned missing persons into test subjects — and finds that someone is still protecting it. In the outback, isolation breeds menace.
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2. The Dark Mine
Detective Sergeant Kate Hayes arrives in Andamooka expecting routine paperwork: a miner dead in a tunnel collapse, common enough in opal country, where fortunes are clawed from unstable shafts beneath the desert. But Barry Mitchell's death wasn't bad luck — someone set charges to bury him. Kate knows why: an opal strike worth $200,000, hidden for twenty-five years, and two people who both wanted it. One of them killed for it. Then a woman who holds the geological surveys of every claim worth having is abducted — trapped underground and running out of air — and Kate follows the killers into miles of hand-dug tunnel and darkness that swallows torchlight. They have explosives. They've buried one mine already. They won't hesitate to bury another.
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3. Bone Country
A decade of drought reveals what water once hid. When the dam on Kanyaka Station dries completely after ten years of drought, a station hand finds human remains in the mud. The bones belong to Tom Brennan, youngest son of a powerful pastoral dynasty, who vanished in 1998 — written off at the time as just another young man escaping the isolation of outback life. But bones don't lie: Tom was killed, wrapped, weighted, and sunk where he was never meant to be found. Detective Sergeant Kate Hayes faces a family that has ruled the station for four generations — wealthy, politically connected, and determined to protect its legacy. Giving Tom Brennan justice will mean tearing that legacy apart, and the Brennans intend to stop her.
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4. The Salt Lakes
Detective Kate Hayes has spent eighteen months rebuilding her career after the Protocol Seven scandal. Now, leading her first major task force, she faces a killer who poses his victims like art — strangled, positioned facing east, and left in South Australia's salt lakes to mummify in the desert air. All of them solo female travellers; all murdered by a man who believes he is teaching them, and society, a lesson about the dangers of freedom. When he contacts Kate directly, taunting her with his philosophy and hinting that a fifth victim is already captive, the case turns personal. He isn't hiding — he's performing, and he won't stop until his mission is complete. From the dugouts of Coober Pedy to the white emptiness of Lake Eyre, Kate must track a former soldier with tactical training and twenty years of planning before another woman dies.
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5. The Silent Hills
Three years after Protocol Seven destroyed her career, Detective Inspector Kate Hayes believed the conspiracy was buried. She was wrong. When Dr Robert Ashford is found dead in his Adelaide Hills home, the staged suicide fools everyone but Kate — Ashford was one of the few Protocol Seven witnesses to testify and survive. The drive he leaves behind reveals the real truth: Protocol Seven wasn't the crime, it was the cover-up. For fifteen years, government agencies ran illegal weapons testing on civilians, disguising the deaths as accidents, suicides and natural causes — and Protocol Seven existed to eliminate anyone who found out. Now Kate's name is on the list. As she races to decrypt the evidence, she discovers she has been watched for years — every case monitored, every witness she meant to reach already gone. The conspiracy isn't just hunting her. It has been controlling her all along.
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6. The Architect
Dr Sarah Thompson discovered the conspiracy beneath the conspiracy — Project Architect, a thirty-year programme of corrupting officials and building networks of complicity that enabled everything from weapons testing to elimination. Then she was murdered to keep it buried. Former Superintendent Kate Hayes knows institutional corruption when she sees it: she exposed Protocol Seven, she revealed the weapons-testing scandal, and now she is hunting the man who designed it all. Dr Richard Vaughn is brilliant, methodical and invisible — thirty years recruiting the vulnerable and controlling them through mutual destruction, his name never once in an operational file. When a dying ASIO agent offers Kate the evidence to expose the whole architecture, she finds Vaughn has prepared for exactly this moment. Some conspiracies end with arrests. Others can only end by burning down the institutions that protect them. The stunning conclusion to the Kate Hayes series.
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If you enjoy the Kate Hayes thrillers, explore Phillip Strang's other Australian outback crime fiction — same red country, same uncompromising eye.
DI Maya Thorne — Australian Outback
Phillip Strang's flagship outback series. DI Maya Thorne works the same harsh interior as Kate Hayes, across eighteen novels of remote-community crime where the landscape is the first obstacle and everyone keeps their own counsel.
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DSC Sarah Reeves — Australian Outback
Another outback investigator cut from the same cloth. If you like Kate Hayes's blend of remote settings and hard-edged detection, the Sarah Reeves series is a natural next read.
See the Series →Explore the Reading Guides
Frequently Asked Questions
What order should I read the Kate Hayes books?
Start with The Red Dust and read in order through to The Architect. The early books work largely as standalone outback cases, but from The Salt Lakes onward a larger conspiracy takes over the series, so reading in sequence gives the full weight of Kate's story.
How many Kate Hayes books are there?
There are 6 Kate Hayes novels, beginning with The Red Dust and concluding with The Architect. Together they take Kate from a remote outback posting to the centre of a national conspiracy.
Where is the Kate Hayes series set?
The series is set across outback South Australia — Coober Pedy, Andamooka, the Flinders Ranges, and Lake Eyre — before moving to the Adelaide Hills in the later, conspiracy-driven books. The landscape is central throughout, giving the series its distinctive outback-noir atmosphere.
What kind of thrillers are the Kate Hayes books?
They begin as gritty outback police procedurals and evolve into large-scale conspiracy thrillers. Readers who enjoy Jane Harper, Chris Hammer, or Garry Disher will find the outback crime elements familiar, with an escalating institutional-conspiracy thread running through the second half of the series.
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