Fatal Research

Lachie Drummond, second tenor and final-year computer science student, is found dead at the base of the Hartley Building's external stairwell. The university calls it an accident. Alex Moreton calls it something else.

Lachie was brilliant, precise, and two moves ahead of everyone in every room he entered. He was also researching the seams of the university's data architecture - the invisible join between a counselling centre's clinical records and the institution's student management system. The place where, as he had begun to suspect, something was there that was not supposed to there.

He sent two late-night texts before he died. One was about what he'd found. The other was about a requiem in the wrong key.

In a fifth novel for the Riverside Mysteries, Classics scholar Alex Moreton, follows the counterpoint, not just the melody. Lachie had pointed to the relationship between lines that tell the truth but the the individual counterpoint notes won't carry - she can detect the dissonance in the labyrinth of research ethics, therapeutic betrayal, institutional surveillance, and the particular cruelty of pretending to listen that was never what it claimed to be.