These are the six people the Tilly Sommerfeld Mysteries rest on, before Tilly needs any of them: a hotel housekeeper, a librarian, a girl on a jetty, a farm wife, a deckhand and a country sergeant, each telling in their own voice the one story the novels never get to tell. The South Coast of Queensland between 1935 and 1945, before it was the Gold Coast and while the holdouts still called it Elston.
Every origin is a complete six-chapter case, and nobody dies in any of them. The trouble is always a concealed situation rather than a body, and the person who works it out is the one it costs. For readers of Kerry Greenwood and T. E. Kinsey. They are being written one at a time; each stands alone, and none of them requires a novel to make sense.
The Books
Book 1
The Standing Account
Three years dry, and a stock and station man drives up a road that goes nowhere with an advance against the coming sale. On that bottom line is the second tank. Her husband says no, and says nothing else.
Not yet on sale
Book 2
The Uncut Pages
A volume comes back over the counter with every leaf still joined at the fore-edge, uncut. The man who borrowed it has subscribed for eleven years, and the committee has just asked her which shelves do not pay.
Not yet on sale
Book 3
The Washed Tin
Every tin on the trestle was lent from a door and goes back on the Wednesday. One comes off the launch scrubbed out, warm and dry, smelling of a soap she cannot name. She can name anything.
Not yet on sale
Book 4
The Room That Was Not Slept In
Room fourteen is let, registered and paid three weeks running, and nobody has rung its bell, dented its pillow or wetted its soap. On her list, in her own hand: an answer by Friday.
Not yet on sale
Book 5
The Landing Marks
A tear in the far bank that was not there on Thursday, where a boat was driven hard up the mud. No landing on that shore, nobody living on it, and nobody willing to say who works it.
Not yet on sale
Book 6
The Night Cleaner
The electoral roll's revision gives one line a place instead of a person: a boat on the reach, lived on, occupant unknown. He knows exactly who lives aboard, and he knew her father.
Not yet on sale
The complete collection
Elston: Six Origins
Six origin stories from the Tilly Sommerfeld Mysteries, set on the South Coast of Queensland between 1935 and 1945, when the maps still said Elston. A farm wife, a librarian, a girl at the picnic trestle, a hotel housekeeper, a deckhand and a country sergeant, each with one small case and one week they did not talk about again. Nobody dies in any of them.
Not yet on sale
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