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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...