Acknowledgements

No book of mine is written without sitting in a chair for a long time. I suppose you could do it standing, but I’ve never got the hang of it. So thanks to three chairs in my office (aka our living room), one arm and two dining. Each contributed in their own way. Thanks also to various seats in Ubers, trains and planes (in particular 8C on QF 739 Sydney–Adelaide), and even the odd park bench. You know who you are.

Thanks once again to first readers, Scott Lockley and Shish Lal, for their feedback and constructive suggestions, gently shared. It takes ages to read a book, much longer than it does to look at a painting, so their efforts are much appreciated.

Thanks to the extremely knowledgeable Paul Dillon for excellent and generous advice about drugs and overdoses and death.

Thanks to Alex Khromtsov from GreenByte for help working out all the I.T. stuff. Any techno-mistakes are mine, not his.

I have been very fortunate to work with Echo Publishing. Juliet Rogers is always friendly, kind, insightful and astute. Diana Hill shepherds my stories through from Word document to book with great care. Many thanks to editor Lauren Finger for so many great suggestions. It’s a pleasure to work with them all.

I want to thank two of my favourite writers, Jane Harper and Richard Osman. I’ve never met either, but as I tried to figure out how to write an intricate murder mystery that worked, I studied one of each one of their books, Survivors and The Thursday Murder Club. I learned a lot from taking two books I loved, pulling them apart (not literally, except that one time I had a tantrum, but I stuck all the pages back together) and trying to work out how they did it. Learn from the masters.

Writing a murder mystery is kind of like doing a jigsaw puzzle, but you have to design all the pieces yourself as you go. Often you get to the point where things don’t quite work, and there is clearly no way they will ever work, because you’re hopeless and you always have been, and always will be. Luckily for me, that only happens about once every forty minutes. When it does, sometimes the best thing to do is to try to forget the bloody book for a bit and hang out with my family. So big thanks to my daughters Lily, Nina and Bibi and my wife Lucy for being great company.