Nothing Was Taken: A Melbourne crime novel inspired by true events

A man walks into a framing shop after closing. He pays cash. He gives no surname. And he asks one strange thing.Don't put a label on the back.Rai Chams should have said no.Instead, he turns the painting over - because that is what he is good at, and because the back of a thing is where it forgets to lie. He finds a label steamed off by an expert and four surviving millimetres of an accession number belonging to a public collection.The same painting is hanging in a gallery four kilometres away. Tonight. According to the State of Victoria.One of them is a stranger. And a very polite man with a valuation contract has already started counting the days.What Rai uncovers over one Melbourne winter runs from a gold nugget stolen from a museum that never reported it, through a drawer of belongings taken from bodies nobody could name, to a brass memorial board with a name filed off - and a woman in Coburg whose mother left a plate out every night for nineteen years.Somebody has been quietly making this city's objects say nothing for ninety years.They are not hiding. They have never had to.Five interlocking cases. One city that keeps losing things.Nothing Was Taken is the first novel in The Melbourne Files - crime fiction inspired by real Australian cases, for readers of Jane Harper, Chris Hammer, Garry Disher and Ann Cleeves.Each case stands alone. Together, they are something much worse.- A protagonist who reads the backs of objects - a genuinely original investigative method- Five self-contained mysteries with a series-long thread running underneath- Authentic Melbourne: Fitzroy, Port Melbourne, Coburg, the Dandenongs- Dark, funny, and humane - never gratuitous- No cliffhanger cheat: Book One resolvesScroll up and start reading today.