Learning a Trade

Melbourne is burning.

When small-business fire-safety contractor Callan Rooke stumbles across a criminal scheme feeding the city's illicit tobacco trade, one mistake pulls him and his family into a brutal war of arson, extortion and organised crime.

Shopfronts go up in flames. Ledgers vanish. Lawyers arrive before the smoke clears. And every choice draws the fire closer to home.

As tobacconist Sahar Naderi fights to keep criminals from using her shop, detectives race to untangle a network built on fear, silence and dirty money. But the deeper Callan digs, the more he learns that this war is not fought only with petrol and guns. It is fought with paperwork, blackmail, surveillance and the price ordinary people will pay to protect the ones they love.

Set against the streets, shopfronts and industrial shadows of contemporary Melbourne, Learning a Trade is a topical and high-stakes crime thriller about ordinary people trapped inside a criminal economy that thrives behind locked shutters and burning buildings.

Callan understands fire systems, alarms and compliance. He knows how buildings fail. What he does not know is how quickly his own life can be turned into evidence, how easily a stolen laptop can become a weapon, or how efficiently organised crime can use lawyers, forged records, surveillance and public shame to destroy a family.

As the violence escalates, Callan, his wife Jessa, their daughter Elodie, Sahar, and a growing circle of frightened witnesses must decide whether survival means staying silent, running, or learning how to make the trade itself too expensive to continue.

Dark, gripping and terrifyingly plausible, Learning a Trade is a commercial Australian crime thriller for readers who enjoy contemporary organised-crime fiction, urban suspense, morally tested families, legal pressure, police investigations, and stories where ordinary people are pushed to their breaking point.