A Murder at the Nutmeg Grove — placeholder cover, art not yet revealed

Coming · A Restoration Mystery

A Murder at the Nutmeg Grove

Penang · Malaysia

On a Penang spice estate, June restores a century-old nutmeg grove — and finds the estate’s tidy official history growing over something far less tidy.

Who does a garden really belong to, a hundred years on?

Coming soon. June travels east, to Penang.

A heritage spice estate wants its historic nutmeg grove restored in time for a centenary. June’s brief is simple; the estate’s history, it turns out, is anything but. And the resident water monitor has a habit of turning up wherever the ground’s been recently disturbed.

Full blurb to come. The postcard list gets the cover reveal, the opening chapter, and the release date first.

  • Slow Burn
  • Amateur Sleuth
  • Colonial Ghosts
  • Body in a Charming Place
  • Forced Proximity
  • A Garden With Secrets
  • Monsoon Mood
  • Second Chance at Love

why this place

Penang’s old spice estates are impossibly lush, and impossibly layered — every generation planted over the last. Standing in one during a downpour, you can feel exactly how much a place can bury and keep growing anyway.

If you love Verity Bright, T.A. Williams or Jenny Colgan, you’ll feel right at home here.

Keep travelling with June

While I write, you’ll get one postcard a month: a photo from a real garden behind the series, the strange true story I found there, and a line on how the writing’s coming along. When the first story is ready, you’ll read it before anyone else in the world.

The first fifty on the list get an actual paper postcard, mailed from my desk in Australia.