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
The afternoon edition she never reads carries a body at the Pavilion. Then a policeman climbs her stairs wanting a word with the woman who writes the crossword, and will not say why hers.
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Book 2
The Correction
Halden knocks before the kettle boils, and by lamplight she reads a dead man's service record against a widow's closed property file. Two machines typed these pages. Only one of them should have.
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Book 3
Dead Air
A piano teacher is dead, and inside his bench are three lines in his own careful hand, drawn to be read by somebody. The police call it a note. Dru is not sure it is words.
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Book 4
The Ghost Compiler
Irene Harrington has read the envelope until she knows every crease in it. Inside: provenance for a private art collection, the signatures all correct, and three facts around them that cannot all be true.
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Book 5
The Necessary Traitor
The police call it natural causes. His landlady calls him a careful man, and a careful man does not leave his shoes heels-together on wet sand. Then a stranger begins choosing benches.
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Book 6
The Altered Record
Marie Foyle sets a refused repatriation file on the newsagency counter, and the account in it reads true. The paper does not. One page has been through a typewriter twice, by a hand that meant it.
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Book 7
The Black File
Douglas Webb comes from the RSL holding his briefcase as though it might be taken, and within a day Dru has traced his telephone calls to a box beside an office with no name on the door.
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Book 8
The Bondi Broadcast
Thursday's police gazette gives her inspector two lines. By morning a radio shop has lost its transmitter and three months of logs. Someone is taking away her channels, one at a time, in order.
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