Elysian Evenings

Professor Hadley MacNamara arrives in Perth from Oxford carrying a private ledger and a plan to make things right. By the following morning, he is dead.Classics lecturer Alex Moreton noticed something wrong in a wine glass she was not supposed to notice.Working alongside Detective Sergeant Rachel Quinn, Alex begins to read the evening as a text: the practised ease of a senior administrator's conversation at the bar, the calculated stillness of a doctoral candidate during the toast, forty seconds of negotiation heard through a cedar screen. Three inconsistencies. Four. A pattern.The investigation leads back through fifteen years of formal complaints that were received, reviewed, and quietly directed to fail. And to a person who had built an entire institutional life on the conviction that the record could be managed - who had not considered that a classicist with thirty years of reading practice, a very old pharmacology seminar, and an absolute inability to look away from an inconsistency might also be reading the record. Patrick Maher spins curious tales of imagination and mystery, set in other times and other worlds for readers of all ages, where psychic abilities, science, and medicine can easily leap about in the playground of the mind together. His stories are set in worlds that seem normal but one step removed, where deep, enduring friendships are valued.