The Raven’s Daughter of Wirra Ridge
A Ravenswood Hollow Mystery – Book 2
A brass key with a raven on the bow. Marks no one can read. And Ravenswood Hollow’s most beloved man, found at the foot of his archive stairs in the rain.
Four weeks after the events of The Tower on Wren Lane, tarot reader Tansy Gray is settling back into her restored studio on Wren Lane when a child drops a strange brass key into her Stray Objects bowl. The marks engraved on its barrel are unlike anything Tansy has seen – until visiting academic Dr. Iris Vane arrives at Wrenfall Inn and recognises them as a pre-colonial Victorian land notation system, privately developed by a goldfields surveyor to record instruments he didn’t want found.
What the key unlocks is a deed. Written in 1887. Bequeathing forty acres of ridge land to a Wurundjeri guide named Thomas Wirra, in payment for knowledge the official survey records never credited him with. The land has never been developed. And a Melbourne property group has just quietly begun to acquire it.
When Mr. Ambrose Pell – the town’s retired auctioneer, keeper of its unofficial archive, the man Marmalade once honoured with his slow blink of genuine respect – is found dead at the foot of his archive stairs on a Monday morning, Tansy understands that the key has opened something someone very much wanted to stay locked.
As she follows the trail from the goldfields era through a decade of quiet administrative corruption into the heart of the town she has spent four years learning to read, Tansy must reckon with a community built, in part, on a silence it has never examined. And with the discovery that the person willing to kill to protect that silence is someone Ravenswood Hollow has trusted completely.
The Raven’s Daughter of Wirra Ridge is a cozy mystery with genuine historical and cultural depth – atmospheric, slow-burn, and morally serious without ever being heavy. Perfect for readers who love community-centred fiction that asks real questions about what we owe the places we stand on, and the people who were standing there first.
The Ravenswood Hollow Mysteries:
Book 1 – The Tower on Wren Lane
Book 2 – The Raven’s Daughter of Wirra Ridge
