Book

Due Diligence: Stories from Pelican Reach

Series · The Pelican Reach Mysteries

View all books in this series

by Mel Charles

Pelican Reach sits on the Queensland coast, beautiful and contained, designed to hold people gently in place. Margaret Crane, a retired forensic accountant, has accepted this. The Tuesday spreadsheet. The investment club she chairs. The morning walk past the pool while the frangipanis do what they do each season, reliably, without drama. Then James Calloway moves into apartment fourteen. He is perfectly pleasant and knows every resident's name after one introduction. He sits where he can see the room. He volunteers nothing about himself. And when the first death comes to Pelican Reach, as it will, and then again, and again, Calloway is always near it: not the cause, and never quite clear of it. Besides Margaret, through all of it: Barb, the retired GP who reads a wound the way other people read a room. Nev, the solicitor who remembers inconvenient things at useful moments. And Calloway himself, who will eventually sit down at the table, but not before months of keeping everyone at arm's length from the truth he came to Pelican Reach to find. Stories on Due Diligence is a collection of six short mysteries set in a retirement village where the puzzles reward careful attention, and the community is worth protecting. The question running beneath every case is one Margaret knows better than to ask too directly: can you trust a person who is keeping secrets for the right reasons, when you have no way of knowing whether the reasons are right? She answers it anyway. That is, after all, due diligence. A collection of short fiction set in the world of The Pelican Reach Mysteries.

Publication date: June 8, 2026