Bondi Beach, 1947. The telegram from New Guinea made Dot Campbell a widow; her late husband's Australian Terrier, Blue, made her a detective. When someone starts quietly taking the beloved Bondi Pavilion apart, the police offer a file and a shrug, and Dot discovers she cannot walk past the one detail that does not fit. Soon there is a small agency above the shops, a thickening notebook, and a suburb that has learned who to bring its trouble to.
These are mysteries of menace and deduction rather than murder: patient campaigns against a community, worked out over cups of tea by neighbours who notice everything, until the threat turns personal. Atmospheric postwar mysteries for readers of Jacqueline Winspear and Kerry Greenwood.
The Books
Book 1
The Bondi Pavilion Mystery
A filed hairpin in the sand, a misspelled sign, a landmark quietly coming apart. The police have a file and a shrug. Dot has an eye for the one detail that does not fit.
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Book 2
The Campbell Parade Conundrum
It begins with schoolboys paid in cash on the post-office step. Then soap on a fish shop window, a depot short of its lunches, and a suburb starting to suspect itself. Dot opens a folder marked MARSDEN.
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Book 3
The Easter Show Enigma
Greta wanted a ribbon at the Royal Easter Show. Someone gouged her prize pumpkins to pulp, and a coordinator has vanished. Dot follows a limp, a napkin, and a thread of navy wool into a racket.
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Book 4
The Central Station Caper
One small brooch, a morning's work at most. Except the trail runs to the Central Station arcade, where shopkeepers are losing their livelihoods one broken window at a time, and the law declines to see.
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Book 5
The Tram Troubles
The trams are Bondi's heartbeat, and the 12B line is failing on purpose. Fresh tool marks on a coupling rod, breakdowns too neat for bad luck, and a pattern somebody will pay dearly to keep buried.
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Book 6
The Hydro Majestic Hotel Mystery
For once Dot works alone: no neighbours, no Blue, just a grand mountain hotel, a vanished diamond necklace, staff closing ranks, and a crackling radio line home. The theft is only the surface.
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Book 7
The Chinatown Chicanery
Boys are going missing along the promenade, and burglaries follow them. What a midnight stakeout turns up is not a gang but a line of frightened children, and a man who counts on nobody noticing.
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Book 8
The Five Beaches Caper
December should bring a missing cat and a disputed fence. Instead: a man with a clipboard, crates shaped rather too much like coffins, and surveyors' stakes at the Pavilion's foundations overnight.
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