Mystery

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The Mistake

by Wendy James
Ligature finest
genre Crime · Literary Fiction · Mystery

Jodie Garrow’s life isn’t perfect, but she’s come a long way—a beautiful house in the middle of town, two children, a successful husband readying a run for mayor. She could almost forget that one mistake, years ago, that could have cost her everything: an unwise affair, an unwanted pregnancy, an adoption arrangement that wasn’t entirely by the book.

But a chance reunion leads to disaster: a police investigation, a media storm, a search for a missing child, allegations of murder—and a reckoning with everyone in Jodie’s life. Suddenly it seems she could lose everything she’s worked so hard to build. Can she prove her innocence? What is the truth, and does it even matter?

The Mistake is an acclaimed thriller of buried secrets, the lies we tell each other and ourselves—and what we become when we smell blood in the water.


Book cover
Where Have You Been?

by Wendy James
Ligature finest
genre Literary Fiction · Mystery

Susan and Ed Middleton are perfectly happy in their model middle-class family on Sydney’s northern beaches. But everything changes when Susan’s mother wills half her estate to Karen, Susan’s sister—a sister who disappeared twenty years earlier and has never been seen again.

The woman who turns up, claiming to her sister, isn’t the Karen she remembers—but that was a lifetime ago. Are there glimpses of the girl she knew, or is it just her imagination? Karen’s disappearance and presumed death all but destroyed her parents’ lives—but will her return threaten the new life and family that Susan has worked so hard for?

Where Have You Been? is a mystery and a thriller, a story of hope, of betrayal—and the fragility of all we take for granted.


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The Steele Diaries

by Wendy James
Ligature finest
genre Historical Fiction · Literary Fiction · Mystery

Zelda Steele is destined for great things. The talented daughter of two celebrity artists, raised by wealthy art patrons in Sydney’s sixties art scene, artistic success is hers for the taking. But Zelda dies young, leaving only the possibility of the artist she could have become—as well as two young children and the rumour of secret diaries.

Years later, Zelda’s daughter Ruth returns to her hometown to search for those diaries. What she finds there takes her deep into the mysteries of her parents’ and grandparents’ lives, and shifts the foundations of her own.

Weaving together the lives of three very different women across three eras, The Steele Diaries is a rich triptych of the tensions between ambition and responsibility, art and family, the past and present and future.