Sydney, 1943. Joyce Brennan is the only woman doing police work on the Eastern Suburbs beat, and she is allowed no uniform, no rank and no real authority. She works from a spare desk in the Bondi Pavilion, and because nobody guards their tongue in front of a typist, she hears everything: at the Kiosk, in the surf, at the dances, in the station lunch room.
Eight books, 1943 to 1948, warm and wry in the register of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, with the institution that will not quite have her out of Maisie Dobbs and Columbo for the engine. Every case is solved without a body: theft rings, missing children, and one wrong note about a baby a mother was never shown, which runs the length of the series. Every book ends with something put right.
The Books
Book 1
The Police Typist
Four thefts from the Pavilion change rooms, stamped no further action, and a widow's wedding ring gone from beneath a folded towel. Nobody on that beach is careful in front of the typist. That is the trouble with the typist.
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Book 2
The Change Room
Sworn at last, and still handed the complaints against women marched off the sand for the wrong bathing costume. Then a man with a whistle and a clipboard decides that Joyce, in her own costume, is next.
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Book 3
The Borrowed Child
An Italian family will not talk to police. They will talk to the woman who went into the surf after one of their daughters. What they tell her is a baby handed to a minder and never handed back.
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Book 4
The Contact Room
The spare desk at the Pavilion was where the station put her to keep her out of the way. Now her closure figures have been read upstairs, and the man who dumped the room on her wants it back.
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Book 5
The Credit
Three weeks of Tuesdays, a green truck, a coal yard behind the tram sheds: she works the ration-book ring alone and catches it cold. Then another man's name goes on it, and she hears the lunch room applaud.
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Book 6
The Photographs
Somebody has been photographing her for a week. A swim in working hours, a dance, the dog. Nothing criminal in any frame, and quite enough to finish her. The pictures go straight to the man who wants her job.
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Book 7
The Temp
Told to take a holiday until things settle, she says she is going to the mountains and moves three blocks instead. The agency sends her; the hospital takes her. Six weeks, no rank, nobody who knows where she is.
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Book 8
The Uniform
She lays the proof on an inspector's desk. He finds it interesting, unofficial, not quite real. So she works it off the books, with a widows' guild, a pensioned ward clerk, and a retired nurse who remembers a safe.
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