It was getting late and I had my bicycle.’ Besides, she hated using the front door, which opened directly into the parlour. No one who’d lived their entire life in the crazy warren of streets that made up Sydney’s oldest suburb would admit to being fazed by the occupants. ‘Not surprised, skulking around like that. Verity slapped her hand to her chest to still her thumping heart. It slid silently into the lock-one twist and she’d be inside, the door shut fast, bolts secured. She traipsed up to the house and retrieved the key from under the rock outside the door. Since she was out of a job she’d have no excuse not to restore it to its former glory. Squinting into the pool of light thrown from next door’s yard, she made her way under the clothesline and past the small patch of dirt that had originally been home to Grandma Clarrie’s prized vegetable garden. She cast a hurried glance around, kicked it shut, then propped her bicycle underneath the decrepit lean-to next to the copper and wringer.

The dunny door swinging on its rusty hinges creaked its usual greeting. Verity Binks wheeled her bicycle into the yard and slumped against the shed, waiting for the blood to return to her cramped muscles. Can she solve it? And will anyone believe her if she does? But as she begins to dig, her investigation quickly leads her to an increasingly dark and complex mystery, a mystery fifty years in the making. At the ball, she lands a juicy commission to write the history of the Treadwell Foundation – an institution that supports disgraced young women and their babies. Her late grandfather Sid, an esteemed newspaperman, would expect no less of her. When would-be correspondent Verity Binks is sent an anonymous parcel containing a spectacular butterfly costume and an invitation to the Sydney Artists Masquerade Ball on the same day she loses her job at The Arrow, she is both baffled and determined to go. Then Clarrie’s new-born son goes missing and everything changes. With the help of Clarrie, her maid, and her beautiful illustrations, she is poised to make a natural science discovery that will put her name on the map. Theodora seeks to emulate prestigious nature illustrators, the Scott sisters, who lived nearby, so she cannot believe her luck when she discovers a butterfly never before sighted in Australia. Theodora Breckenridge, still in mourning after the loss of her parents and brother at sea, is more interested in working quietly on her art at the family’s country estate than she is finding a husband in Sydney society, even if her elder sister Florence has other ideas. What connects a botanical illustration of a butterfly with a missing baby and an enigma fifty years in the making? ‘A twisty historical mystery from a bestselling Australian author.’

Tree Change by Tea Cooper