Mikado Murder

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 University on the Swan River foreshore of Perth, Western Australia. At The Scholar's Table, the corner table is always set. The questions it holds are not always comfortable.