Surfers Paradise Mysteries and the Tilly Sommerfeld Mysteries are the same books: the arc name is on the covers, the line's name on the title page. Ottilie “Tilly” Sommerfeld reaches the South Coast of Queensland in 1946 with eleven pounds, and lives aboard her dead father's houseboat. He left her six objects placed with six households, and a notebook that never says who is holding them.
Each retrieval takes her lawfully into somebody else's house, and what she finds there is somebody else's crime. Not always a killing: six of them turn on a theft, a fire or a swindle rather than a body, and the deaths are quiet and off the page. Warm and dry, for readers of Kerry Greenwood and T. E. Kinsey. They are being written in order; none is on sale yet.
The Books
Book 1
A Death in Probate
Her father's estate has one loose end and one man who can explain it, and he dies at his desk before he can. The doctor is content. The eviction notice on her door is not negotiable.
Not yet on sale
Book 2
A Death in the Stores
A stocktake runs four cases short in a hotel that cannot spare four of anything. The carrier who supplied it is already dead in a locked store room, and the flue is blamed for that.
Not yet on sale
Book 3
A Theft on the Ebb
Nobody dies. A pay box goes off a shelf in a boatshed with no lock on it, fourteen men lose their wages, and the ebb leaves a mud reach that remembers everyone who crossed it.
Not yet on sale
Book 4
A Death in Goodwill
Nine days into a job she took only to satisfy an insurance office, the landlady is dead at the foot of an unlit stair. The district has agreed it was an accident before the sun is properly up.
Not yet on sale
Book 5
A Reader in Arrears
In a subscription reading room after nine, every name in the ledger is behind except one, which borrows constantly and is never overdue. There is no corpse here. Somebody is being quietly sold.
Not yet on sale
Book 6
A Death in Ballast
A rotten ladder, a man of fifty-eight, and an account of the night the police read correctly. It all fits, except the dog now living aboard her boat, who keeps to an hour that does not.
Not yet on sale
Book 7
A Death in Committee
On the Monday she sweeps a corner of a hall out along the road. On the Friday there is a committee man dead in it, and a truthful woman's honest answers put the wrong man in a cell.
Not yet on sale
Book 8
A Death in Consideration
A dog will not touch the scrapings in October, off a plate carried up under a cloth from the hotel kitchen. By November the old woman it was carried to is dead, and the doctor signs without pausing.
Not yet on sale
Book 9
A Death in Bona Fides
With the hotel shut for remodelling, the district's drinking moves into the boarding houses, and so does she. In one of their kitchens she hears an old man refuse to sign a thing over. On the Sunday, he is found.
Not yet on sale
Book 10
A Loss in Quiet Possession
Seven and six a week to board a blind spaniel is exactly what a boarder's meat costs. Then his owner's picnic ground burns with nobody in it, and the blind dog finds a woodheap that should not be there.
Not yet on sale
Book 11
A Death in Safe Keeping
Six flats, six tenants, and only five doors with anyone behind them. The woman who ran the place was open about her illness and made one sensible arrangement in April. In May she died in the night.
Not yet on sale
Book 12
A Death at Will
The landlady will not have cats in her kitchen, so the old builder's basket comes to Tilly, her only way into the house. Eleven days later he is dead in the bathroom, and Edie Larcombe believes she killed him.
Not yet on sale
Book 13
A Death on the Boundary
Two documents describe one boundary and do not agree, which is a small thing until the man who noticed is found dead on the camp flat and the only name the sergeant has is the one paying her wages.
Not yet on sale
Book 14
A Swindle in Abeyance
The man who comes down from Brisbane has his own plan folded in three and his square inked in. She has already written somebody else's name against that square, in her own hand, at a card table on a paddock.
Not yet on sale
Book 15
A Death on Time Payment
Sand comes down on the works office man and the district calls it what it looks like. She has typed the valuation of that plant and what is still owing on it, and the falling tide disagrees.
Not yet on sale
Book 16
A Death in Resumption
Within four days everyone has settled on a name for the surveyor found dead on the land agent's floor with nothing in the office touched. Only the woman with no standing is still asking what he was working on.
Not yet on sale
Book 17
A Death on Section Nine
The island has no road, no policeman and no water that is not carried in. When the man who runs the ferry drowns, his boat is found aground on a bank she has waited out the tide on for years.
Not yet on sale
Book 18
A Boat in Light Trim
Eleven hulls lie on one man's moorings, and from her own deck she can tell which of them is riding empty. When consigned plant goes off the jetty by night, the wrong man is taken up.
Not yet on sale
Book 19
A Death in Competency
Dulcie Threlfall has twenty years on the water and no paper to prove any of it. The only master who could swear to her service dies at his own winch, and his dog will not go past the shed.
Not yet on sale
Book 20
A Death in Effects
A closed asylum is being carted away across the bay, and a day's work at the clearing sale turns up a ledger with her father's surname in it. By dark the auctioneer's clerk is dead on the jetty.
Not yet on sale
Book 21
A Death in Short Residence
The back door is bolted at six every night by the landlady herself, which is the one fixed point in the house. On the Monday the day girl draws that bolt and finds her in the wash-house.
Not yet on sale
Book 22
A Deposit in Trust
Three red crosses on the company's wall plan carry no name beside them, and every other cross does. Then a farmer arrives to camp on the block he paid for and finds it under two inches of water.
Not yet on sale
Book 23
A Death in Reversion
A month to shift the boat off a mooring she has no licence for, and five weeks listing a dead man's marine store. The woman winding up the estate names a day to settle a debt, then does not come.
Not yet on sale
Book 24
A House in Fee Simple
One gate stands between eighteen driven piles and the house she has bought and paid for in work, and the man at it says no. On the Sunday after the launch he is dead, and the doctor is satisfied.
Not yet on sale
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