How a New Zealander from Australia with a British passport struggled with bureaucracy to obtain residence in Rome, Italy.

Ulf is a small former gold-mining town in the hill country of Victoria, Australia. A young woman disappears one night, so completely that a massive search effort fails to find any trace her. Fifteen years later, Erik Portland, a retired clergyman, is challenged to seek out what happened. His research leads him into danger as someone appears to feel he might discover something he shouldn't. He travels to Melbourne where, as some characters seem inclined to say "the plot thickens." The story features hard-working Victoria Police personnel, typically fascinating small-town Australian country...

The Cimitero Acattolico or Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome is the last resting-place of more than four thousand people including the Poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley for whom the cemetery is best-known, although Italians are inclined to think of it as the place where Antonio Gramsci, the founder of Italian Communism, is interred. But there are so many great people lying there. Poets, authors, painters, sculptors, actors, directors, singers, dancers, engineers, architects, soldiers, sailors, airmen, fighters from the Italian Risorgimento, doctors, lawyers, journalists, teachers,...

Castelnero is an ancient village dominated by a castle of dark stone and built on a 300-metre-high pinnacle of rock in the Region of Umbria, Italy. Peter Wood, a tourist from New Zealand, visits the town and inadvertantly becomes involved in unusual happenings which place his life in jeopardy. His association with the ancient Pozzi family, the Carabinieri and various local characters leads him into a mystery which concerns the economic survival of the town. And then, there are the earthquakes. The author has applied recorded history to the imaginary town on top of the rocky crag. The...

Erik Portland lives in the little town of Ulf in the Hill Country of Victoria, Australia. In the past he has successfully solved the mystery of the disappearance of a young woman from the community by following us the 'cold case' that had baffled the local police for fifteen years. This was described in the previous novel 'Ulf'. In this novel he once more uses his contacts though his work as the minister of a small independent Christian congregation in Ulf, his position as a police chaplain, his contacts in the city of Melbourne and the resources of the local and a metropolitan newspaper to...

"Ore" is the third novel by Geoff Spedding set in Ulf, a little former gold-mining and timber-milling town in the hill country of Victoria, Australia. The main character of all three books is Erik Portland, a retired church pastor who ministers in an independent congregation in Ulf. In the first book, "Ulf" he becomes involed in, and solves, the mystery of a teenage girl who had been missing for fifteen years. In "Ash," the second novel, he solves the mystery surrounding the violent death of a young fire fighter during a wild fire which roars through teh village. In "Ore," Erik Portland is...

"What grownups don't know can't hurt them" is the philosophy of Claire Mannering, the leader of a group of ten-year-old children in 'Cardigan' a little rural town in the rich dairying province of Taranaki in the North Island of New Zealand. The town is overshadowed by a large, dormant volcano which affects the weather quite considerably. It rains a lot in Cardigan. 'Cardigan' is a story set in 1952 involving the 'Mannering Gang' just seven years after World War Two and during the Korean conflict of 1950 - 1953. It is about children living in an atmosphere of freedom and little supervision...

'Fourteen' is a chronicle of events which befall the Mannering Gang, a group of young people who were the main characters in 'Cardigan', a story about their adventures in 19452 when they were ten years old. It is now 1956 and they are fourteen years old and attending high school. They happy existence in Cardigan is overshadowed by the predations of a cruel, sadistic monster who attacks young girls. No one knows who the perpetrator is and the police are baffled. They have a profile of somebody who could be anybody. When the Mannering gang decide sto take a hand in the investigation they place...