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.
The Books
Book 1
A Death in Probate
A letter three months behind its date promises her an answer on Monday. On Monday the solicitor's blind is down and the town is certain it was his heart. A man from the department gives her thirty days.
Not yet on sale
Book 2
A Death in the Stores
Sixty doubles should be on the linen shelf at six in the morning; forty-one are. By the Tuesday a man is dead in a locked store two doors from that shelf, and the doctor blames the flue.
Not yet on sale
Book 3
A Theft on the Ebb
On the Friday fourteen men come up the reach for their pay, and the tin is not on the shelf where it was put. The shed has the only lock on that water, and nobody uses it.
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Book 4
A Death in Goodwill
The old dog is out in the yard at first light, soaked through, when she has never slept anywhere but outside Olive Culley's door. At the tank stand behind the outside stair, the woman who runs the house is dead.
Not yet on sale
Book 5
A Reader in Arrears
A printed form wants half a page from two persons of standing, so she takes the evenings at the subscription reading room. Every line in the book there goes months past the fortnight. One name does not.
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Book 6
A Death in Ballast
Gilbert Askew wrote his cargo down twice, once on the boards and once below. By Thursday he is under his own cutter at the bottom of the tide. She pours the tea for all four accounts.
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Book 7
A Death in Committee
Worse money than a season: a hall, stairs and seven men's rooms before light. The card of the boat's wants has not lost a line since April, so she takes it. Nobody in that house ever lights the hall.
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Book 8
A Death in Consideration
Eight words: a surname and a district. Three hours of road inland to ask. The old woman at the end of the asking has been off her food since the winter, and everybody agrees there is nothing to be done.
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Book 9
A Death in Bona Fides
Boarded off for the works, the hotel has sent the coast's evenings into the boarding houses, and she takes kitchen work in one. The drink there comes on an old lodger's name. On the Sunday he is carried out.
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Book 10
A Loss in Quiet Possession
Seven and six a week to board an old man's spaniel is exactly what her own dog's meat costs. Then his picnic ground burns, and on the Sunday the blind dog works over a woodheap standing where none ever stood.
Not yet on sale
Book 11
A Death in Safe Keeping
Four days into opening a wall for borer, she walks into a yard where nobody is doing anything. Joan Stapleton, who ran the place, died in the night at forty-three. Six live there; only five doors have anyone behind them.
Not yet on sale
Book 12
A Death in Sufferance
The valuer sent to price the guesthouse lives in it, putting a tape to every wall, and his two cats cannot be where food is cooked, so they come to her boat. The front rooms are being cleaned for nobody.
Not yet on sale
Book 13
A Death on the Boundary
Four years under a bed, and two plans of one selector's boundary do not agree. The chainman who found the difference tells a neighbour to put nothing more on her allotment. By Monday he is dead at the camp.
Not yet on sale
Book 14
A Swindle in Abeyance
Her hand fills the buyers' column at a card table on a pegged paddock. Then a tidy man in a shiny suit comes down the sand track with a worn plan, and the square inked on it is already sold.
Not yet on sale
Book 15
A Death on Time Payment
The man who kept the fill works' books is dead under a sand face, and the district has said what sand does. Her way out to that works is a causeway that goes under sideways between the piles.
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Book 16
A Death in Resumption
On a Saturday the street door stands open and the counter does not. A man is lying out on the land agent's floor, a good way clear of the bottom tread, and nothing in the building has been touched.
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Book 17
A Death on Section Nine
A family going off Section Nine cannot take the goat with the house, so the goat comes aboard for a fortnight's board. Then the man who holds the island ferry goes into the water, and his boat is found aground.
Not yet on sale
Book 18
A Boat in Light Trim
She counts the eleven hulls on Purkiss's moorings twice every morning and knows how each sits empty. A woman off the mail run says a boat came in dark on the front, and nobody asks her a thing.
Not yet on sale
Book 19
A Death in Competency
Twenty years on other men's boats, and no paper anywhere that says so. Dulcie Threlfall's certificate wants a master to swear to her service, and the one man who agreed dies at his own winch.
Not yet on sale
Book 20
A Death in Effects
A man on the island writes that her father's surname is in the closed asylum's effects book. At the sale she gets one column before the table is carried off; by Sunday the auctioneer's clerk is dead on the jetty.
Not yet on sale
Book 21
A Death in Short Residence
Two sets of books that do not disagree about money, only about weeks. Four cheques the hotel posted to the boarding house that nobody there ever saw. On the Monday morning Mrs Rowsell is found in the wash-house.
Not yet on sale
Book 22
A Deposit in Trust
She only goes up to the display house on Fridays, to telephone the week's hours through. On the wall behind the counter every sold block has a surname and a town in the margin. Three have nothing at all.
Not yet on sale
Book 23
A Death in Reversion
The notice has been running since Friday: four weeks to shift the boat off a mooring she has no licence for. Then a line in a dead man's ledger. A carved whale's tooth, delivered to her father, not paid for.
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Book 24
A House in Fee Simple
Eighteen piles driven and set, and the only way in is through one farm gate. At the launch, in front of fifty people, the old man whose gate it is refuses. By Sunday he is dead in his own yard.
Not yet on sale
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