The Architect
(2025)(The sixth book in the Kate Hayes Australian Outback Thriller series)
A novel by Phillip Strang
For fans of Tana French's complex conspiracies, C.J. Box's institutional thrillers, and Jane Harper's Australian crime fiction.
Dr Sarah Thompson discovered the truth about Project Architect—the conspiracy beneath the conspiracy. A systematic programme that spent thirty years corrupting government officials, building networks of complicity, enabling crimes from weapons testing to elimination operations.
Then someone murdered her to keep that truth buried.
Former Superintendent Kate Hayes knows institutional corruption when she sees it. She exposed Protocol Seven. She revealed the weapons testing scandal. She prosecuted officials who thought they were untouchable.
Now she's hunting the architect who designed it all.
Dr Richard Vaughn is brilliant, methodical, and invisible. For three decades, he's recruited vulnerable officials, compromised their integrity, and controlled them through mutual destruction. His students went to prison during the Royal Commission. But Vaughn himself escaped—name never appearing in operational files, perfect deniability maintained.
Until dying ASIO agent Marcus Price offers Kate evidence that can expose the architecture completely. But Vaughn has prepared for this moment. Dead man's switches. Institutional chaos. Threats that make prosecution more dangerous than letting corruption survive.
Kate's career is already destroyed. Her allies are marked for elimination. And the deeper she investigates, the more she realizes Vaughn's architecture extends beyond anything she imagined.
Some conspiracies end with arrests. Others require burning down the institutions protecting them.
THE ARCHITECT—the stunning conclusion to the Kate Hayes Mysteries. When justice requires destroying everything, how far will one investigator go?
Genre: Mystery
Dr Sarah Thompson discovered the truth about Project Architect—the conspiracy beneath the conspiracy. A systematic programme that spent thirty years corrupting government officials, building networks of complicity, enabling crimes from weapons testing to elimination operations.
Then someone murdered her to keep that truth buried.
Former Superintendent Kate Hayes knows institutional corruption when she sees it. She exposed Protocol Seven. She revealed the weapons testing scandal. She prosecuted officials who thought they were untouchable.
Now she's hunting the architect who designed it all.
Dr Richard Vaughn is brilliant, methodical, and invisible. For three decades, he's recruited vulnerable officials, compromised their integrity, and controlled them through mutual destruction. His students went to prison during the Royal Commission. But Vaughn himself escaped—name never appearing in operational files, perfect deniability maintained.
Until dying ASIO agent Marcus Price offers Kate evidence that can expose the architecture completely. But Vaughn has prepared for this moment. Dead man's switches. Institutional chaos. Threats that make prosecution more dangerous than letting corruption survive.
Kate's career is already destroyed. Her allies are marked for elimination. And the deeper she investigates, the more she realizes Vaughn's architecture extends beyond anything she imagined.
Some conspiracies end with arrests. Others require burning down the institutions protecting them.
THE ARCHITECT—the stunning conclusion to the Kate Hayes Mysteries. When justice requires destroying everything, how far will one investigator go?
Genre: Mystery
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Used availability for Phillip Strang's The Architect