Riverside Mysteries

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.

The Swan River Festival of Voices drew choirs from six universities across Australia and New Zealand, and in its twelfth year had achieved the kind of reputation that attracts corporate support, civic pride, and - this year - an Italian foundation bearing what its press release described as a significant and previously unknown Vivaldi manuscript, to be authenticated and performed for the first time in modern history. The Vivaldi manuscript goes missing and the festival's brilliant, volatile accompanist is found injured at the base of the choir loft stairs. She says she saw who took it. Someone needs her to forget. Vivaldi Voices is a novel about authenticity - in music, in professional identity, in institutional behaviour, and in the particular courage required to keep saying true things in rooms that need you to be wrong. 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.

When the director of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society's landmark Mikado production dies on opening night, the death looks like a terrible accident. The prop sword that kills Rupert Dalloway has passed every safety check. The stage manager's records are impeccable. Four hundred people are in the house, and no one has seen anything.Dr Alex Moreton, classical scholar and reluctant chorus member, has spent three weeks watching Dalloway work. She knows what the production cost the people who made it - the designer whose concepts were presented under his name, the wardrobe mistress whose drawings went up on a donor event screen without attribution, the assistant director who began recording rehearsals to protect himself. Working with Detective Senior Sergeant Quinn and with the formidable assistance of philologist Sigrid Bane, Alex follows the evidence through the anonymous letters, the backstage recordings, and a scale model of a corridor built eight weeks before the production began - into a case that asks a question the law cannot fully answer: when an institution fails the people who trusted it, and the failure is deliberate, and the damage is real, what does justice actually look like?The Mikado Murder is the third novel in the Riverside Mysteries, set in a fictional University on the Swan River, Western Australia.At The Scholar's Table, the corner table is always set. The questions it holds are not always comfortable. 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.

When retired archivist Nadia Carmichael's body is found in the Swan River, the note she left behind says almost nothing - and Alex Moreton knows that is wrong. Nadia spent forty-one years making sure things were named. A note that names nothing was not written freely.What Nadia left instead was a direction: find the Harlow Papers, find Dr Stella Bungala. What Alex finds is a university archive containing the buried record of a 1914 Whadjuk Noongar land claim, a Crown review that partially upheld it, and a council decision recorded in five words: No further correspondence with claimants. Someone has spent nineteen years ensuring that decision stayed hidden.Set along the Swan River foreshore of Perth, Western Australia, Archival Avoidance is the fourth novel in the Riverside Mysteries - a literary cosy series in which the past is never entirely past, and the stolen archive remembers everything. 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.

Lachie Drummond, second tenor and final-year computer science student, is found dead at the base of the Hartley Building's external stairwell. The university calls it an accident. Alex Moreton calls it something else.Lachie was brilliant, precise, and two moves ahead of everyone in every room he entered. He was also researching the seams of the university's data architecture - the invisible join between a counselling centre's clinical records and the institution's student management system. The place where, as he had begun to suspect, something was there that was not supposed to there.He sent two late-night texts before he died. One was about what he'd found. The other was about a requiem in the wrong key.In a fifth novel for the Riverside Mysteries, Classics scholar Alex Moreton, follows the counterpoint, not just the melody. Lachie had pointed to the relationship between lines that tell the truth but the the individual counterpoint notes won't carry - she can detect the dissonance in the labyrinth of research ethics, therapeutic betrayal, institutional surveillance, and the particular cruelty of pretending to listen that was never what it claimed to be. 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.

Another atmospheric murder mystery set within the cloistered halls of WAU, where ambitious scholars hide dangerous secrets. Blending literary suspense with intricate plotting, these standalone mysteries explore ambition, obsession, and the price of knowledge. Early morning at The Scholar's Table restaurant and Marco Giordano is found standing over the body of a property developer with organised crime connections in the private office of his own restaurant. He says he found the man dying. The evidence, initially, says something else. Alex must prove her closest friend's innocence while discovering that Marco has been carrying secrets she didn't know existed - and that some secrets are kept out of love.The final novel draws together threads from earlier books: the university's property dealings (Books Four and Five); organised crime connections in the Perth hospitality trade; the riverfront development that has been quietly accumulating across the series as a background pressure. Sigrid Bane is given her fullest role in the series, and the final coda closes the narrative arc of every major character.Can classics scholar Alex Moreton, and DI Quinn find out who killed Real Estate wheeler and dealer, Vincent Harker - and what was he doing in Marco's restaurant? 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.