Introducing the Honourable Phryne Fisher: Become addicted to Phryne's first three riveting mysteries

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Allen & Unwin, Dec 1, 2010 - Fiction - 576 pages
'Phryne Fisher is gutsy and adventurous, and endowed with plenty of grey matter.' West Australian

Our unflappable, unconventional and uninhibited heroine, The Honourable Phryne Fisher, leaves the tedium of English high society for Melbourne, Australia, and never looks back. In her first three adventures, she encounters communism, cocaine, kidnappers and murderers. Phryne handles everything- danger, excitement and love - with her inimitable panache and flair, and still finds a little time for discreet dalliances and delicious diversions.

In Cocaine Blues, the London season is in full fling at the end of the 1920s, but the Hon. Phryne cannot face any more flower arranging, polite conversation with retired Colonels or dancing with weak-chinned men - and decides it might be rather amusing to try her hand at being a lady detective in Melbourne, Australia. From the time she books into the Windsor Hotel, Phryne is immediately embroiled in exotic and erotic mystery.

Phryne steps up again in Flying Too High, handling a murder, a kidnapping and the usual array of beautiful young men who cluster around her with style and consummate ease - and all before it's time to adjourn to the Queenscliff Hotel for breakfast. Whether she's flying planes, trying to clear a friend of homicide charges or searching for a kidnapped child, she employs the same dash and elan with which she drives her beloved red Hispano-Suiza.

In Murder on the Ballarat Train, the glamorous Phryne, accompanied by her loyal maid, Dot Williams, decides to travel to the country by train, but the last thing she expects is to have to use her trusty Beretta .32 to save their lives. What was planned as a restful country sojourn turns into the stuff of nightmares: a young girl who can't remember anything, rumours of vile white slavery and the body of an old woman missing her emerald rings.

'Phryne Fisher, an investigator with all the charm, wit and intelligence of James Bond, and as many lovers.' Sunday Sun

'With Phryne Fisher, the indefatigable Greenwood has invented the character-you-fall-in-love-with genre.' The Australian

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About the author (2010)

Kerry Greenwood is the author of more than forty novels, six non-fiction works and the editor of two collections. Other novels in the Phryne Fisher series are Death on the Victoria Dock, Blood and Circuses, The Green Mill Murder, Ruddy Gore, Urn Burial, Raisins and Almonds, Death Before Wicket, Away with the Fairies, Murder in Montparnasse, The Castlemaine Murders, Queen of the Flowers, Death by Water, Murder in the Dark, A Question of Death: An illustrated Phryne Fisher treasury, Murder on a Midsummer Night and, most recently, Dead Man's Chest. She is also the author of the Corinna Chapman crime series, several books for young adults and the Delphic Women series. When she is not writing she is an advocate in Magistrates' Court for the Legal Aid Commission. She is not married, has no children and lives with a registered Wizard.

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