For book lovers, a day at the beach is as much a chance to lose yourself in a good read is it is an opportunity to take a dip or catch some rays.

There’s nothing quite like a crime novel for uncomplicated escapism, and these four are sure to hit the spot.

While they are all by Australian authors and were published in the past year, they’re very different in style and setting – taking you from the NSW bush, to an Adelaide art gallery circa World War I and all the way to the peat-filled boglands of Ireland.

Lyrebird, by Jane Caro

A lyrebird as a witness to murder? Now there’s an original idea for a mystery.

The crime at the centre of Jane Caro’s novel dates back 20 years, when young ornithology student Jessica Weston hears what she thinks are a woman’s screams in the NSW Barrington Tops wilderness area. It turns out it’s actually a lyrebird – but that’s little comfort given that these clever birds mimic real sounds.

Police dismiss Jessica’s claims that something sinister may have occurred nearby – until a body turns up in the same area two decades later. Now, ex-detective Megan Blaxland is determined to solve the murder, reuniting with the bird expert in the process.

While The Lyrebird has an environmental theme and an authentic Australian bush setting that is both stunning and sinister, it also ventures into the seedier side of Sydney with a storyline involving brothels and human trafficking.

A fine follow-up to Caro’s bestselling debut crime novel The Mother, this is a twisty mystery that is certainly more suited to the beach than a wilderness escape.

The Unquiet Grave, by Dervla McTiernan

Anyone who has been a fan of Perth-based Irish author Dervla McTiernan since her 2018 bestseller The Ruin would have been thrilled to see her return to Ireland and garda Cormac Reilly in The Unquiet Grave.

In between, there were a couple of other Reilly books (The Scholar and The Good Turn), then two stand-alone novels set in America, but McTiernan feels like she’s on more solid ground with the Irish series.

The Unquiet Ground is set mainly in Galway, where a mutilated corpse found preserved in a bog turns out to belong to a school principal who went missing a couple of years earlier. As Reilly struggles to solve the crime, two more bodies turn up, sparking fears of a serial killer. And if that’s not enough to keep a garda busy, his ex-girlfriend wants his help to find her husband who has disappeared in Paris.

Some elements of the plot stretch credibility, but there’s an enjoyable familiarity in the key characters and McTiernan does a fine job of transporting readers to the Irish countryside.

The Hiding Place, by Kate Mildenhall

There’s a healthy dose of biting satire in Kate Mildenhall’s latest novel, which sees a group of middle-class Aussie urbanites and their kids converge on a bush property they’ve all pitched in to buy as an idyllic escape from the city.

Things go wrong from the outset as one of the friends careers off the road with her camper-trailer while trying to avoid a deer en route to Willow Creek, and others in the party clash with a neighbour and a family of squatters.

It’s no spoiler to reveal that someone will end up dead – and not by natural causes – by the end of their first night. The real tension comes from the attempted cover-up, and the gradual revelation of secrets and lies involving infidelity, psychoactive plants and money.

None of the adults are as virtuous as they first appear, and it’s fun to bear witness as their earnestness and good intentions are skewered as brutally as the poor lamb served up on a spit for Sunday lunch.

Mildenhall (whose previous novels include The Mother Fault and Stella long-listed The Hummingbird Effect) has written a captivating literary thriller that will make you question just how far you’d go to help your friends. That mental image of the wrong-headed deer will be especially hard to shake.

Murder on North Terrace, by Lainie Anderson

A body dumped in an art gallery lies at the centre of this mystery set in the heart of “genteel” Adelaide in 1917. The fact that the dead man was on the gallery’s board and was found lying beneath a provocative nude painting he acquired for it just adds to the intrigue.

Murder on North Terrace is the second novel in South Australian writer Lainie Anderson’s so-called “petticoat police mystery series” featuring policewoman Kate Cock – inspired by an actual pioneering police officer named Fanny Kate Boadicea Cocks – and her sidekick Constable Ethel Bromley. It’s no matter if you didn’t read the first book (The Death of Dora Black) – this one reads fine as a stand-alone.

While Kate and Ethel are usually kept fully occupied protecting the city’s female residents – and safeguarding their virtue – the latter’s society connections see her seconded to the art gallery murder investigation. Meanwhile, the rather more straightlaced Kate is grappling with the brutal assault of a young girl.

While the crime narrative is engaging, Anderson also hooks the reader with a portrayal of WWI Australian society that manages to be both sharp and humorous .

“Well, it’s the arts, sir – chronically underfunded by politicians whose idea of culture is watching men kick a football,” says Ethel, in one biting observation that still rings true today.