Drusilla Mercer compiles the cryptic crossword for a Sydney newspaper, and that is all anyone is meant to know. In the war she broke ciphers for a naval intelligence unit that officially never existed. Peace was supposed to bury the skill. Instead, in 1948, a coded message surfaces inside her own paper, in a hand she long ago gave up for dead, and the counting begins again.
Eight mysteries, 1948 to 1954, worked cool and exact. Each book closes its local case; each leaves the deeper pattern, and the courteous, nameless office behind it, one move further into the light. For readers of Jacqueline Winspear, Kate Atkinson's Transcription, and the quieter end of le Carré: less a comfort read than the slow, paranoid pleasure of a mind that will not stop counting.
The Books
Book 1
The Crossword Cryptographer
A coded message surfaces inside her own paper, set in a hand she buried years ago. The friend who taught her the cipher is alive, and sending. Then the first quiet death arrives.
Coming soon
Book 2
The Correction
A document examiner falls from the headland, and the fall reads wrong. Beneath it: a forged signature on a widow's land, and corrections somebody paid to make permanent.
Coming soon
Book 3
Dead Air
Late on the amateur bands, an old colleague reaches her with a single transmission and goes to static. On a radio they call that silence dead air. She knows exactly what it means.
Coming soon
Book 4
The Ghost Compiler
An elegant little problem: a collector's paintings that are not what the paperwork swears. It leads through shell companies to a man left for dead on a gallery stair, and Bea is months ahead of her.
Coming soon
Book 5
The Necessary Traitor
An old man dead on the sand at first light, his shoes placed too neatly beside him. Under the quiet death: a wartime ledger, six men lost in a prison camp, and one who came home.
Coming soon
Book 6
The Altered Record
It starts with a widow's refused repatriation claim: a page fed through the typewriter twice, by a hand that meant it. Not one altered record. A system of them, years deep.
Coming soon
Book 7
The Black File
Thirty-five days on a private countdown. The office with no name has stopped watching and started clearing the landscape, and the fabricated file it prints carries the one name she cannot afford to lose.
Coming soon
Book 8
The Bondi Broadcast
Voss has spent eight years keeping a woman listed as dead. Dru is the one person who can read the lie back to its source, and she means to make him say it before thirty thousand people.
Coming soon
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