Why a Booktrail?
1863: Melbourne is a hotbed of opportunity and danger.
The Case of the Wandering Corpse
What you need to know before your trail
Melbourne is a hotbed of opportunity and danger. The promise of gold lures prospectors from far and wide, turning the city into a melting pot of ambition and a breeding ground for crime. In this intoxicating backdrop, “The Case of the Wandering Corpse” unfolds.
Findo Gask and Erroll Rait, our intriguing duo of protagonists, are drawn into a web of intrigue when they stumble upon a man wrongly accused of murder. Fueled by their unyielding sense of justice, they embark on a journey to set things right, but little do they know that their quest will lead them into the treacherous heart of an unscrupulous secret criminal society.
As they race against time to exonerate the innocent man, Findo and Erroll find themselves entangled with a shadowy and malevolent secret society that is spreading its sinister tentacles throughout Melbourne. This society, known for its ruthlessness, will stop at nothing, even murder, to achieve its dark goals. And at the heart of those goals lies an obsession: the location of a hidden hoard of gold stolen from a daring robbery years earlier.
The story is mostly set in Melbourne and the gold rush towns to the north like Ballarat. However, the story starts in southern Africa with the Battle of Blood River between the Boers and the Zulu nation.
Travel Guide
Australia
Much that contributed to the formation of Australia as we know it today came about in this decade, including the vast wealth extracted during the gold rush, the tragedy of the Burke and Wills expedition (one of the most celebrated journeys of the ‘heroic era’ of Australian land exploration) and the era of bushrangers who preceded Ned Kelly, like Frank Gardiner, Captain Moonlight and others.
It was an age before electronic communication in Australia, before radio, before any connection by telegraph to Europe and an age where, at best it would take 80 days to sail from Melbourne to Liverpool and usually much, much longer – assuming the ship wasn’t wrecked on the way. It witnessed the first cricket tour by an English team to Australia and an all-Aboriginal cricket tour to England. It also saw the first running of one of the world’s most prestigious horse races, the Melbourne Cup.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: The Case of the Wandering Corpse
Destination: Author/Guide: David Cairns Departure Time: 1953
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