The Bondi Community Detective Agency

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.

Coming soon

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.

Coming soon

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.

Coming soon

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.

Coming soon

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.

Coming soon

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.

Coming soon

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.

Coming soon

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.

Coming soon