Running late to the Hinkler gala performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's Ruddigore, Phryne Fisher meets some thugs in a dark alley and handles them convincingly before they can ruin her silver dress. Phryne then finds that she has rescued the handsome Lin Chung and his grandmother and is briefly mistaken for a deity. Denying divinity but accepting cognac, she later continues safely to the theatre. But the unexpected continues as the performance is interrupted...

Driving home late one night, Phryne Fisher is surprised when someone shoots out her windscreen. She alights to finds a pretty young man with an anarchist tattoo dying on the tarmac just outside the dock gates. He bleeds to death in her arms...and all over her silk shirt. Enraged by the loss of the clothing, the damage to her car, and this senseless waste of human life, Phryne promises to find out who is responsible. But she doesn't yet know how deeply...

When she tries to go on summer holiday, Phryne Fisher discovers that the Johnsons, who were supposed to be at the vacation home, are nowhere in sight, beginning a mystery that involves smugglers, pirate treasure, and the mysterious Madame Selavey.

The Hon. Phryne Fisher, languid and slightly bored at the start of 1929, is engaged to find out if the antique-shop-owning son of a Pre-Raphaelite model has died by homicide or suicide. At the same time she is asked to discover the fate of the lost illegitimate child of a rich old lady, to the evident dislike of the remaining relatives.

When St. Kilda has its first Flower Festival, the Honourable Phryne Fisher becomes the honorary Queen of the Flowers. But when one of her flower maidens and her adopted daughter Ruth both go missing, Phryne puts aside her duties as queen and takes up her duties as investigator.

When a series of blond, pregnant teens go missing from the Magdalene Laundry in 1929 Melbourne and a pushy woman reporter disappears while investigating, Phryne and Dot uncover a dark plot involving piracy, convents, and creepy cellars.

Phryne Fisher is on holiday. She means to take the train to Sydney (where the harbour bridge is being built), go to a few cricket matches, dine with the Chancellor of the university and perhaps go to the Arts Ball with that celebrated young modernist, Chas Nutall. She has the costume of a lifetime and she's not afraid to use it. When she arrives there, however, her maid Dot finds that her extremely respectable married sister Joan has vanished, leaving...