The Jigsaw Library at Sixteen Mile

About this book

In Sixteen Mile, an opal town in the South Australian desert where people live, worship and drink underground, retired schoolteacher Greta Kovač runs a free library of four hundred and twelve secondhand jigsaw puzzles from her dugout. When an old cutter named Milan Petrović dies, his granddaughter Sasha arrives from Melbourne to sell his dugout and leave within the week. Then the puzzle boxes start coming back with something extra inside: a sliver of black opal, sealed in an envelope with no note. Greta knows that colour. It belongs to the Halloran Moon, the stone that vanished in 1983 on the night a miner died, the night the whole town decided Milan was a thief, and the night Greta told the police what she had seen. Somebody wants the town to look again. Greta is no longer sure she wants to.