NO COOLING OFF-PERIOD

NO COOLING-OFF PERIOD is a warm, witty Australian cosy mystery set in Sydney’s Inner West, where a final renovation, a street full of secrets and a family who never intended to become detectives collide.Fin and Ava Hartley have spent twenty years building a life in Sydney and eighteen years climbing its property ladder, one renovation at a time. Number 23 Wattle Crescent is supposed to be their seventh and final project: a magnificent old Victorian and their chance to secure the family’s future and finally step off the buy-renovate-sell treadmill.The plan is simple. Keep their heads down. Finish the renovation. Sell. Move on.Wattle Crescent has other plans.The street has its own unofficial government: seven formidable women known as the Hags, who remember every house, sale, family and grudge. There is a neighbourhood WhatsApp group with alarming influence, unsolicited Bunnings advice, gossip that travels faster than council notices, suspiciously friendly neighbours and a teenage son who notices more than his parents realise.Then something doesn’t add up.A story changes. A neighbour knows too much. A property detail makes no sense. Fin sees patterns; Ava sees people. Neither is a detective, but their questions draw them deeper into old loyalties, neighbourhood politics and family secrets hiding beneath the polished façades of desirable homes.Set in the fictional Sydney Inner West world of Linden and Morton, NO COOLING-OFF PERIOD combines an amateur-sleuth mystery with humour, warmth and the social life of a tightly connected community. The houses are beautiful, the neighbours are complicated, and everyone seems to know everyone else’s business - or thinks they do.The novel’s distinctive property-market backdrop is informed by experience. The author and his wife lived in Sydney for twenty years and spent sixteen years renovating and flipping five properties while balancing work and family life. The novel extends that experience fictionally: the Hartleys have spent eighteen years renovating six properties and are tackling their seventh.The story is entirely fictional. The murders, characters and events are invented. What is authentic is the texture of the world around them: renovation chaos, property ambition, inspections, buying and selling, building frustrations, neighbourhood relationships and the strange attachment to houses you eventually have to leave behind.That gives the mystery a distinctly Australian sense of place while keeping the focus on what readers come to a cosy mystery for: memorable characters, an intriguing puzzle, humour, community and a street worth getting to know.NO COOLING-OFF PERIOD is Book 1 in The Wattle Crescent Mysteries, a continuing Australian cosy crime series set in the fictional world of Linden and Morton. It introduces the Hartleys, the Hags and a neighbourhood with enough history, personality and secrets to bring readers back.They came to renovate one last house. They didn’t expect to become part of the street.