Book 2

Bingham and The Runaway Wife

by James Warden

Published 30 October 2019
Bingham shared the feeling of exhaustion he saw in the youth's face as he relived the day his mum ran away, and that was what Bingham wanted. Soon, he hoped, memories would be stirred, old loyalties and disloyalties restored: the passing of time and the slip of the tongue. Slowly, a picture of this woman was forming in his imagination. Bingham wasn't one to be hurried. 'There will be time ... to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet'. Eliot's phrase came back to him as he sat in the family's kitchen pondering and watching the son of Helen Sanders.

Book 4

Robert Courtney had been missing for several months along with a quarter of a million pounds from some Treasury budget. There had been the usual splash in the papers, the usual rush and tear of reporters in the village and then all had gone quiet. The police seemed unable to find the young man, which had puzzled Bingham and annoyed his friend, Simon Brockie, the retired Detective Chief Inspector, who had seemed disinclined to discuss the matter.

Book 6

On holiday in Australia, Bingham and Lina come across a stranded motorist, his car hung partway up a tree, the result of avoiding a kangaroo. Their act of kindness takes them to Yulara, the staging post for the sacred rock, Uluru, where they meet Nellie Doolan, an Aboriginal of mixed race, and, eventually, her father. While there, they are told that Helen Lewis, who runs the local Aboriginal art gallery, has gone missing.

Arriving in Alice Springs, they visit a similar gallery where the owner, Marjory Fink, has also disappeared. Talking with the locals, particularly the woman’s son, Henry, and her former lover, Ben Evans, they find little cause for concern.

Bingham, however, takes the view that coincidences are for Russian novels and he begins asking questions that leads to an investigation by him and Lina that takes them back and forth along the Stuart Highway, visiting the roadhouses as they go.

Their search is marked throughout by an awareness of the strange and startling Aboriginal culture which leads Lina, alone in the region of the sacred rock, along the Pathways of the Dreaming and a simple truth.

This is the sixth in the Bingham series of novels and the first in which he and his wife, Lina, are both involved in an investigation from the very beginning.