Brick Brown has a problem: she hates her day job, and her beloved Uncle Baz has gone missing.
Although a bartender by trade, Brick Brown has finagled herself a job on the city council to investigate a complaint that threatens to close her uncle's well-loved blues club in the heart of Melbourne.
Brick suspects something strange is going on, but when her amateur sleuthing uncovers the mayor's dead body in a locked room, she's dragged into the dangerous world of dodgy developers with the reluctant help of Mitch Mitchell, a prickly war correspondent turned investigative journalist.
Relying on her street smarts and an unlikely band of allies, Brick and Mitchell unearth corruption that runs deeper than just local government, and the stakes are higher than they banked on. And when Brick also discovers some terrifying information about her past, the stakes turn deadly...
Sally Bothroyd lives in Darwin with her partner and daughter. She's currently the director of the Northern Territory Writers' Centre, but before that worked for many years as a journalist - both in broadcast and in print.
Sally grew up in Victoria and lived in Melbourne in the 1990s. She returned there for a period in the 2000s to study filmmaking at the Victoria College of the Arts.