Bondi, 1947. Frankie Morrison is the cadet reporter her paper keeps assigning to women's interest, the recitals and reopenings and dog shows nobody else wants. She keeps coming back with something harder: rigged competitions, altered records, a council minute with one word quietly changed. Each investigation crosses into another corner of postwar Bondi, from Connie Reilly's library to the Icebergs' winter pool, and each one costs her something to print. Beside her, and mostly in her way, is Jack Callaghan, a war correspondent home from bigger stories, in a rivalry that slowly turns into a partnership neither will name first.
Character-forward investigative mysteries with warmth, conscience, and a slow-burn romance, solved with a notebook rather than a body. For readers of Jacqueline Winspear, Kerry Greenwood, and Sulari Gentill.
The Books
Book 1
The Opening Number
Frocks and mothers, two hundred words, done by Thursday: that is the ballet recital as Vance sees it. The school on Hall Street leaves her standing by the coats, and gets on with itself while she watches.
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Book 2
The Missing Volume
The library on Bondi Road has reopened and wants a piece about its reading circles. Then a donation line in the 1938 board minutes buries everything after the folio under four words, and Miss Reilly keeps her ledgers locked.
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Book 3
The Minute
The Icebergs baths and the winter swimming club go before a council vote on a developer's submission. Eleven years of minutes sit in a windowless records room, and the clubhouse door stays shut to a woman with a notebook.
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Book 4
The Wrong File
A man is in a cell over the Bondi Road business. Vance halves the folder, the police half to Jack Callaghan, and sends Frankie to the woman whose telephone call he liked least.
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Book 5
The False Ribbon
At the showground a border collie holds his stance under a gold CHAMPION ribbon barely a season old, and looks like he hasn't eaten in a week. At the rope, a dog-walker named Kit Moran is watching him too.
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Book 6
The Front Page
Six hundred words of human interest: the Bondi View guesthouse landlady is marrying. Nora Hargrave decides the best defence against a wedding notice is daylight, and plenty of it. Her bridegroom swims alone off the point at first light.
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