A Decline in Prophets

Winner of the Davitt Award for Best Adult Novel

Travel back in time to 1932 and book a first-class suite on the passenger liner RMS Aquitania, but take care, for among your fellow passengers is a ruthless killer. . . . Direct threats from Australia's warring Right and the Left having quieted, so wealthy Rowland Sinclair and his group of bohemian friends are their way home to Sydney via New York after a lengthy stay in Europe.

The wealthy Sinclair scion has treated his artist friends to first-class accommodations on the Cunard ship, the luxury liner of the day. Also on board are some members of the Theosophical Society (a spiritualism movement), as well as an aggressively conservative Irish Catholic Bishop and his cohorts. Their clash ups the tensions in first class and presents the liner's captain with a tricky situation when bodies start to drop.

It is Sinclair's bad luck that he becomes a suspect in the first death, that of the Bishop's beautiful young niece. But before the ship docks, he is cleared and the investigation, and further crimes, are taken ashore to the Australian capital and into some of its grand country houses—and of course, Rowly and his amateur sleuth friends follow.