The tea ladies are back but the winds of change are blowing. It’s 1966, the year of the introduction of decimal currency, and the Sydney Opera House is under construction. Businesses are introducing the new Café-Bar machine and doing away with their tea ladies. Hazel and her colleagues decide to form a guild to try to save their jobs and organise a demonstration.

In the meantime, Hazel meets a Danish acoustics engineer here to work on the Opera House, and her neighbour’s teenage daughter is persuaded to accept the position of housekeeper at the residence of the local priest after the sudden death of the previous long-standing housekeeper, Auntie Vera.

In addition, Hazel’s difficult lodger, Irene, discovers that her husband has died in jail and left her mysterious clues to something for her to find.

This means that there are several plotlines running throughout the story. Hazel and her sleuthing friends are trying to ascertain if Auntie Vera’s death was suspicious, determine the true identity of the Irish ‘clergymen’ and what they are up to, and cope with big upheavals in their society, lives and workplaces.

It takes a while to build up to the attention-grabbing action in The Cryptic Clue and some of the earlier sections are a bit slow, but it is definitely worth persevering to see all these sub-plots resolved and an open ending for Hazel.

Reviewed by Lynne Babbage

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I grew up on a dairy farm in the back-blocks of Aotearoa New Zealand but my mother had a love of literature and classical music, so books and music were a part of our lives. My father was British, from Liverpool, and like many Northerners, a natural storyteller.

He was the published author of a slim volume of short stories. One day in class, he read aloud a short story by the American humourist, James Thurber. I was absolutely enthralled by the style and the wit of Thurber’s writing and was weeping with laughter. When the story finished, I looked around to discover the rest of the class were unimpressed, wondering what was wrong with me.

From my teen years onwards, I continued to read widely, from crime to the European classics and particularly American and British 20th century literature as well as contemporary fiction. Reading is still a big part of my life.

Back then many magazines published short stories but I had limited success. A simpler way to publication was writing spec. articles about subjects I was interested in and submitting them to magazines. I had a number of articles published and worked with editors, and began to hone my writing skills.

I’d spent so many years getting to this point, I wanted my first novel The Olive Sisters to be the best work I could produce and really gave no thought to publication at all until it was finished. Between work and family life, I managed to find pockets of time to write. About 50,000 words into the book, I realised that I had the wrong protagonist and put that work aside and started again. In the second version the story flowed more easily.

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