Alex Moreton thought she understood grief. She thought she understood archives too: their order, their absences, the way a missing page could say more than a hundred that remained.Then she finds a hidden vault beneath the university, and inside it a record of everything her family and her institution have spent generations trying not to know. There is a dead girl, a dead engineer, a ledger that keeps the dark half of the story, and a woman who has spent forty years standing guard o...

The lighthouse at Lassiter Point has been decommissioned since 1986. The Heritage Council believes the shire owns it. The shire believes the Heritage Council does. No one has paid for maintenance since 2003, and the Fresnel lens has been sitting in the dark ever since.Until it wasn't.At two in the morning, the lamp comes on. Forty minutes exactly. Old Mossy, who has sat on the Rockingham seawall long enough to remember how the coast used to sound, has seen it before — three...

When a development application appears on the chandlery door at the south end of the Bent Street foreshore, the Safety Bay Six recognise the signs: a heritage-listed building, a compressed public comment period, and a sub-floor excavation scheduled in six weeks. What the application doesn't mention — and what Barry, Annie, Rose, Vic, Kath, and Pip are determined to protect — is the hollow floor that Pip documented two years ago, a stone chamber beneath it that pre-dates the Australian colo...

January brings the lowest tide in forty years to Safety Bay, Western Australia — and with it, rising from the sand off Becher Point, the black ribs of a crayboat that has not seen light since the winter of 1959. The Orion Star. And with the boat comes the story the town has been keeping in its tin: a missing bank payroll, a skipper who swam ashore through killing water and never explained himself, and sixty-five years of quiet suspicion that passed for certainty.The Safety Bay Six ...

The car alone should have been a warning. Long, low, the colour of wet slate, parked across two bays like the lines were somebody else's problem — and out of it steps a man who looks at the Safety Bay foreshore the way you'd look at a fish you're about to fillet.When a developer's marquee goes up over the lagoon every kid in Safety Bay has known their whole lives, Barry, Rose, Annie, Kath and Vic know exactly what's coming. What they don't have is proof — so they get some, at dawn,...

Sixty-one years, three brass plaques, and a locked biscuit tin nobody has ever seen opened — that's the Bay Fryer's whole reputation, gone from a cool room that was locked the entire time. No broken window. No forced door. Just a tin-shaped nothing on a shelf, and a landlord's lease letter sitting on the spike like a clock starting.The Safety Bay Six follow the only clues going: a salt-dried footprint two sizes too small for any grown suspect, a sleeve of stolen drone footage, and ...

Something is moaning on the headland at Point Peron — and whatever it is, it empties a school camp in under an hour.Barry Carter is fourteen, constitutionally unable to lie to his mother, and — as the framed commendation on the HQ wall attests — President of the Safety Bay Six. When Year Nine camp ends two days early after an unearthly sound drives twenty-six boys and two teachers from their bunks, Barry knows, with the reluctant certainty of a boy who has been right about this sor...

It is the summer holidays in Safety Bay, and Barry Carter has a credibility problem. Lying on his verandah at eleven forty-two on a hot January night, he watches a green light blink twice, pause, and blink twice again from Penguin Island — which has been closed since the last ferry came home at four. Nobody believes him. Barry mistook a wheelie bin named Bruce for a shark. He has no credibility.But Rose believes him. And Rose recruits Annie, who already has a notebook. The notebook...

When the body in the bag is the wrong body, the case becomes the case. The seventy-three papers at the novel's centre are not, as you first assume, a list. They are a ledger. Academics rarely admit in public: that scholarship has always been inseparable from patronage, and patronage from obligation. Academic institutions, where power is quiet, consequences accumulate slowly, where power protects itself in beautiful rooms and Dr Alex Moreton's dining table at the Scholar's Table on the Swan...

The Scholar's Table was closed. This was not a thing Alex had ever seen before. This was different. The police tape was a fact. The officer posted outside the staff entrance was a fact. The absence of sound from a building that was almost never silent in daylight hours — no espresso machine, no delivery rattle, no voices from the kitchen — was a fact she found she hadn't prepared for. Marco was being held as a murder suspect - the body was on his premises. The knife was his. Yesterday the ...

It is a Tuesday evening in the university choir. Lachie Drummond is twenty-two years old, a final-year computer science student, and he sings second tenor with an instinctive sense of line that the conductor acknowledges by directing the rest of the section to listen to him. He is also two moves ahead of everyone in every room he enters. He has been working on a thesis about seams — the invisible joins in institutional data architecture, the places where different systems meet.At e...

On a January morning in Perth, a woman is recovered from the Swan River. She was the university's chief archivist — precise, stubborn, entirely without sentiment about what an archive was for. She knew where every document was.There is a note at her house. A single page. Handwritten.It says: I cannot undo what was done.It doesn't say what was done or what gets buried, and what survives the burying, and what it costs the people who decide that something buri...