Book

Due Diligence

Book 2 in The Pelican Reach Mysteries

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by Mel Charles

James Calloway moved into unit fourteen at Pelican Reach two days before Martin Forde, the quiet man in unit eleven, died of an apparently natural cardiac event. Calloway walks at five-thirty, tends his allotment with the focused precision of a man who needs something to do with his hands while he thinks, and expresses, when told about Forde's death, the controlled absence of surprise of someone who already knew. Ted Barlow notices this, because Ted has learned to notice things. Six weeks after the events that changed Pelican Reach forever, Ted, Shirley, and Arthur are still learning what it means to pay attention. The case they find themselves inside is larger than the last one: not a retirement village and a corporate fraud but an intelligence network from the early 2000s, a government file that was never meant to surface, and a sitting minister with twenty-five years of managed consequences and the means to keep managing them. Martin Forde spent seven years building a record. He hid it somewhere in the estate, in a personal place, the way careful people hide things. Someone else has been in the estate for three weeks looking for it. The question Book Two asks is one Ted, Shirley, and Arthur cannot answer from outside it: 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? The only way to find out is to keep reading. Due Diligence is the second book in the Pelican Reach Mysteries, a series about three people in their sixties and seventies who have learned, late and at some cost, to pay attention to the right things. The cases get larger. The people stay the same size. That is what makes them interesting.

Publication date: April 4, 2026