TheBondiParcelsMysteries

Bondi, 1946–47. The war is over and the mail has gone mad. Rhoda Sixsmith carried parcels through the war, then was retrenched when the men came home — until the Bondi Beach Post Office invents her a job: Delivery Enquiries Assistant, with a PMG letter authorising her to ask questions to get a stubborn parcel delivered — a skeleton key into the houses of the famous and the back offices of the trade.

These are gentle historical cozies in the register of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency — how-done-it puzzles solved without a body. Every case: an urgent parcel fails strangely, and completing the delivery means uncovering the hidden trouble behind it. Underneath runs a comedy of suitors and one carpenter schoolfriend neither Rhoda nor Col will look at directly — a slow-burn courtship you'll wait all eight books to see land.

The Books

Book 1

Return to Sender

Three servants swear they never saw the registered parcel Rhoda has been sent to deliver to a Campbell Parade wireless star. The signature she needs will expose a charming man whose warmth turns out to be only a shopfront.

Coming soon

Book 2

A Particular Shade

The district's most famous painter storms off when his custom red arrives correct on paper and wrong in the tin. The handmade colour-mixer has vanished south, and a house of unpriced canvases waits five weeks from auction.

Coming soon

Book 3

Money for the Dead

The army listed him killed in 1943; this March someone lodged his war-gratuity order in person, over a counter. Somewhere nearby a quiet man has come home and cannot make himself walk the last mile to his mother's gate.

Coming soon

Book 4

Postmark Megalong

Four brown-paper parcels arrive each year in the same careful hand, addressed to a valley where the name on them does not exist. Rhoda walks a washed-out mountain road toward a name no one has said aloud in thirty years.

Coming soon

Book 5

Missing in Transit

Registered mail is disappearing between the city and the branch, and the arithmetic is cruel: the thief has to be someone inside her own small post office. Then the paper trail turns toward the man who invented her job.

Coming soon

Book 6

No Fixed Address

A parcel posted in 1944 names a man known only by his fishing shack — and the wife who sent it has been dead two years. Rhoda works the coast by dinghy, trailing a man who rowed out of the world.

Coming soon

Book 7

Deepest Regret

Behind a cabinet that has not moved since the war, the painters find a death telegram franked March 1943 and never delivered — addressed to a mother three streets away who still sets a place at Christmas for her boy.

Coming soon

Book 8

Signed For

With her position wound up and her authority lapsing, Rhoda is handed the state's oldest live file: a fortune one Bondi woman has refused for nine years — and, at last, the one file she never let herself open, her own.

Coming soon