Sydney, 1946. The war is over, the trams run full from first light to last, and the depots are quietly chalking down how many women they still need. Tess Treloar, twenty, a wartime conductress on the Bondi line, is framed off the trams ahead of the retrenchment. Once she has proved the paper wrong, a newspaper ad brings her a shoebox of letters from people with wrongs nobody official will touch.
These are mysteries solved without a body: forged complaints, skimmed wages, a widow's pension filed away on purpose. Tess reads waybills, rent books and rosters the way other detectives read a crime scene. Warm, fair-play, and firmly on the side of the letter-writers — for readers of Alexander McCall Smith, Jacqueline Winspear and Rhys Bowen.
The Books
Book 1
The Crooked Waybill
Two clean-record write-ups in one fortnight, and a name chalked onto the depot board. Someone is writing Tess off the trams in ink she never touched, and paper does not lie by accident.
Coming soon
Book 2
The Gift Gone Sour
A good turn gone sour: the laundry place Tess found for Carmela keeps paying light, a shilling at a time. Forty women in a workroom, one tidy ledger, and a hand patient enough to steal small.
Coming soon
Book 3
The Landlord Who Wasn’t
Eviction notices bloom along Campbell Parade and the whole street curses a landlord none of them has ever met. Tess counts the rent books and starts to wonder whether the man exists at all.
Coming soon
Book 4
The Beach Gear Affair
The Scarba children finally have beach kit of their own, until it starts vanishing and the outings stop. Tess begins with the absence, and the trail runs through a boy, a pub, and a hard question about mercy.
Coming soon
Book 5
The Widow in the Drawer
Every counter tells war widow Nola the same kind lie: papers not found. Tess does the sums nobody official will, and the arithmetic points to a respectable hand that filed a woman's whole life away on purpose.
Coming soon
Book 6
The Missing Fiancé
Jim Meadows stepped off the troopship fourteen months ago and never walked the last mile home. Tess works back along the line, one wharf clerk at a time, to learn why a good man stopped three streets short.
Coming soon
Book 7
The Man Her Son Sent
He mends the gutters, stakes the geraniums, and calls himself a mate of a son who never came home. Kindness, or a patient con? The deeper Tess reads Clem Craddock, the harder it is to tell.
Coming soon
Book 8
The Last Run
One last run. With the conductresses being wound down and her own notice handed in, Tess opens the shoebox a final time: June, twenty years on the trams, framed for skimming with the figures kept from her.
Coming soon
New to the world of Bondi?
Sign up for the newsletter and get free Bondi short mysteries delivered to your reader.
Get free Bondi short mysteries