Harbour House
Old wharf timber, glass, rain, expensive restraint, and rooms that remember who opened them.
Book 1 in A Mara Kuroda Corporate Mystery
Dead Before Demo Day
Sydney rain. Startup pressure. A founder dead before the pitch.
Corporate cozy mystery with teeth: fair-play murder, dry wit, glass-walled pressure, and a risk consultant who hears what people leave out.
The opening case
A demo day. A dead founder. A company already rehearsing its official story.
When Mara Kuroda arrives at Harbour House for a high-stakes startup demo week, she expects investor nerves, polished optimism, and ordinary workplace evasions. She does not expect the founder to be dead.
The puzzle lives in routine: access badges, catering notes, run sheets, room bookings, and the language people use when a truth is too expensive to say plainly.
The world
Harbour House is warm enough to enter and sharp enough to worry about.
The Keel & Kettle
Coffee, community, overheard pauses, and the kind of warmth that notices when something is off.
CanaryWorks
Clean yellow optimism, investor polish, engineering fatigue, and a future everyone needs to believe in.
Access Routes
Glass corridors, badge panels, reflected movement, and the ordinary architecture of permission.
Public-safe character canon
Everyone has a role. Everyone has pressure.
Mara Kuroda
Corporate risk consultant. Controlled, precise, and warmer than she permits herself to appear.
Priya Bell
Operations made human: calm logistics, careful language, and a room held together by competence.
Jessa Miro
Blunt technical truth-teller. She tells the truth badly, which makes people prefer the lie.
Nate Hargreaves
The charismatic founder at the centre of demo week: camera-ready, under-slept, and running out of room.
Hiro Tanaka
Matsuda Capital's representative. Formal, controlled, and careful about what is written down.
Pip Wainwright
Harbour House community manager. They are the building's memory in a cardigan.
Gia Chen
The official counterweight: procedural, direct, and already waiting for the fact beneath the adjective.
Tom Rayner
Sales charm under commercial pressure, where certainty has to arrive before the numbers do.
Full trailer
Watch the public-safe trailer.
The trailer introduces the pressure chamber: demo day, a dead founder, Mara Kuroda, Harbour House, and the promise of a fair-play corporate mystery.
Post-read companion content
Some evidence stays sealed until the final page.
The reader room holds spoiler-protected extras: the full CanaryWorks case file and the audio deep dive. Use the password printed in the book.
Unlock Reader Room