Phryne Fisher - dangerous, passionate, kind, clever, and seductive. She drinks cocktails, dances the tango, is the companion of wharfies, and is expert at conducting an elegant dalliance.

It's the 1920s in Melbourne and Phryne is asked to investigate the puzzling death of a famous author and illustrator of fairy stories. To do so, Phryne takes a job within the women's magazine that employed the victim and finds herself enmeshed in her colleagues' deceptions.

But while Phryne is learning the ins and outs of magazine publishing first hand, her personal life is thrown into chaos. Impatient for her lover Lin Chung's imminent return from a silk-buying expedition to China, she instead receives an unusual summons from Lin Chung's family followed by a series of mysterious assaults and warnings.

"Greenwood's strength lies in her ability to create characters that are wholly satisfying: the bad guys are bad, and the good guys are great" - Vogue

"Phryne Fisher is gutsy and adventurous, and endowed with plenty of grey matter" - West Australian

"Elegant, fabulously wealthy and sharp as a tack, Phryne sleuths with customary panache ... [she is] irresistibly charming" - The Age

"Phryne Fisher is young, wealthy, beautiful, smart, confident and independently minded, and she has a knack for solving murders when she is not sipping a strengthening cocktail or planning another seduction" - The Australian's Review of Books