Book Three: Mikado Murder — A man is dead behind a painted Japanese stage set in a Subiaco theatre. The orchestra plays on for three more minutes.Four hundred people in the house do not yet know what has happened, and Dr Alex Moreton, classics lecturer and reluctant Yum-Yum, has ninety seconds to her cue."Alex Moreton is the detective I have been looking for. Not damaged. Not haunted. Not in recovery from anything. Simply very good at what she does and quietly at home in he...

The annual Classics Dinner is in full swing. Professor Hadley MacNamara — formidable, silver-haired, sixty-five, the kind of man rooms arrange themselves around — is holding court on the veranda of the Scholar's Table above the Swan. His toast is is genuinely brilliant. It moves from Homer to the geography of joy, and the room gives him exactly the silence he deserves.Then, after the silence, something is different.He begins a sentence he does not finish. He reaches for a c...

When the prestigious Italian Bellini Foundation arrives at the Swan River Festival of Voices with a previously unknown Vivaldi manuscript, Dr Alex Moreton notices three things before the opening reception is half over.The provenance chain leads from a Swiss estate sale, through a Zurich auction house, through eighteen months of preliminary authentication in Rome, and arrives in Perth wearing the imprimatur of the Bellini FoundationBy the following morning, the manuscript wa...

A doctoral student lies dead at the foot of a Collie fire trail in the pre-dawn cold. The wallet in his pocket says one name. The body says another. When the body in the bag is the wrong body, the case becomes the case.Two hours north, Dr Alex Moreton — Classics lecturer, mezzo-soprano, friend to the owner of the Scholar's Table and a wise silver grey tabby cat called Virgil — opens an encrypted message from a campus librarian who has been counting. Seventy-three papers. One primar...

Another atmospheric murder mystery set within the cloistered halls of WAU, where ambitious scholars hide dangerous secrets. Blending literary suspense with intricate plotting, these standalone mysteries explore ambition, obsession, and the price of knowledge. Early morning at The Scholar's Table restaurant and Marco Giordano is found standing over the body of a property developer with organised crime connections in the private office of his own restaurant. He says he found the man...

The Swan River Festival of Voices drew choirs from six universities across Australia and New Zealand, and in its twelfth year had achieved the kind of reputation that attracts corporate support, civic pride, and — this year — an Italian foundation bearing what its press release described as a significant and previously unknown Vivaldi manuscript, to be authenticated and performed for the first time in modern history. The Vivaldi manuscript goes missing and the festival's brilliant, volatil...

Professor Hadley MacNamara arrives in Perth from Oxford carrying a private ledger and a plan to make things right. By the following morning, he is dead.Classics lecturer Alex Moreton noticed something wrong in a wine glass she was not supposed to notice.Working alongside Detective Sergeant Rachel Quinn, Alex begins to read the evening as a text: the practised ease of a senior administrator's conversation at the bar, the calculated stillness of a doctoral candidate during th...

Lachie Drummond, second tenor and final-year computer science student, is found dead at the base of the Hartley Building's external stairwell. The university calls it an accident. Alex Moreton calls it something else.Lachie was brilliant, precise, and two moves ahead of everyone in every room he entered. He was also researching the seams of the university's data architecture — the invisible join between a counselling centre's clinical records and the institution's student managemen...

When retired archivist Nadia Carmichael's body is found in the Swan River, the note she left behind says almost nothing — and Alex Moreton knows that is wrong. Nadia spent forty-one years making sure things were named. A note that names nothing was not written freely.What Nadia left instead was a direction: find the Harlow Papers, find Dr Stella Bungala. What Alex finds is a university archive containing the buried record of a 1914 Whadjuk Noongar land claim, a Crown review that pa...

When the director of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society's landmark Mikado production dies on opening night, the death looks like a terrible accident. The prop sword that kills Rupert Dalloway has passed every safety check. The stage manager's records are impeccable. Four hundred people are in the house, and no one has seen anything.Dr Alex Moreton, classical scholar and reluctant chorus member, has spent three weeks watching Dalloway work. She knows what the production cost ...

Immie Whitfield and her circle have mapped the Collector network, destroyed four supernatural nodes across three continents, and built the legal case that will bring the organisation down. Now they know what is left: not a building, not a ledger, not an archive. A manufactured thin place in the west of Ireland, built a hundred and fifty years ago from a covenant that was never supposed to be sealed — holding the original agreement, the true version, the one that proves the Collectors were ...

Book Three of The Magician's Granddaughter series is set in Perth, Western Australia. Book three is the trilogy closer for the discovery arc established in Books One and Two. Book One established the gift of witnessing, the circle, the Collectors as antagonists, and the first Perth operation. Book Two destroyed the Edinburgh Ledger and corrected the Dublin founding document. Book Three discovers the full shape of the Collector network, destroys the Perth node, and maps the remaining instal...