The Commodore of the Fremantle Reach Yacht Club was the most popular man in the room.Twenty minutes after his toast, Ted Marsh was face down in the water beside somebody else's boat.Everyone agrees it was an accident. A warm night, a few drinks, a dark pontoon. The club would very much like it left there.Detective Perry Nash is not going to leave it there.Perry has worked homicide in Perth for thirty years and looks like a man who has misplaced his car keys. He trails off mid-sentence. He forgets what he was asking. Suspects relax around him, right up until the moment he lands the one question that takes their story apart.His new partner thinks he is a liability. Detective Sergeant Ally Novak is young, sharp and entirely by the book, and she cannot understand how a man who cannot finish a sentence has closed more cases than anyone in the building.Then the club's accounts turn out to be four hundred thousand dollars short.Suddenly there is a terrified treasurer who has been quietly covering the hole. A member Ted humiliated in public and who has spent two years telling anyone who will listen. A daughter who has just learned her inheritance is gone. A dock hand with something to hide and a reason to be near the water that night. And a quiet man in a cardigan who nobody in the club can tell you a single thing about.One of them stood on that pontoon in the dark.Every clue Perry finds, you find at the same moment. No tricks, no withheld evidence. Everything you need to name the killer is on the page before he does.Dead Calm is the first Perry Nash Mystery: a fast, funny, fair-play whodunit set among the boats, gossip and very old money of a Western Australian yacht club.Perfect for readers who like their murders clever, their detectives underestimated, and their mysteries solvable.
