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,...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...