CLAIM YOUR FREE AUSTRALIAN HISTORICAL FICTION NOVELLA 

Death on the Rocks

Sydney, 1824. The Rocks. A place where a man's word is worth exactly as much as his wealth.

Judith Sampson runs the New Liffey hotel on Cumberland Street. She is a transported Irish convict, a licensed publican, and a woman who has learned to read people fast. She has to. The Rocks does not forgive slow thinking.

When a grain trader is killed in a Sussex Street storm, the police list it as suspicious and move on. When her lodger David Milligan, a young American carpenter she had grown genuinely fond of, is found stabbed to death on Fort Street, the police hand her his hotel key and offer her very little else.

Judith knows what happened. She has Milligan's journal. She has a note signed with two initials. She has a widow on Pitt Street whose testimony the constables dismissed as hearsay. What she does not have is any legal standing whatsoever, and the man she suspects controls the grain supply to half the hotels in The Rocks.

But this is not simply a story about a murder investigation. It is a story about what women know and are not believed to know. About a sex worker who watched a wealthy man stab someone in the street, kept the knife for months out of rational fear, and then watched him walk free from his first trial. About the moment she decided that justice was worth the risk to herself.

About what it costs to speak the truth in a world designed to discount your voice.

Judith Sampson has no badge, no authority, and no protection. She has a dead young man who trusted her, and a growing certainty that the colonial courts will protect Thomas Wilson unless she finds evidence they cannot ignore.

That is enough.

Death on the Rocks is Novella 1 in The Australian Sandstone Series. It stands alone, but readers who want to follow Judith's world further will find it waiting in the series.