Vested Interests

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.