Dwell Time: An Australian sapphic romantic suspense

They already love each other. That was never going to be the hard part.Eight months after London, Iris Kelleher and Jo Ridley live in a rented three-by-one in Bayswater with a jacaranda out the front, a neighbour with more eggs than two people can eat, and an evaporative air-conditioner that gives up somewhere past thirty-four degrees.Iris runs security at a Western Australian power station and is having the best year of her working life. She was headhunted. She is good at it. For the first time she is not the only person in the building who cares.Jo followed her, on a visa that depends on Iris's job, and has not worked a day in five months. Her whole trade ran on clients believing she kept things to herself, and she proved in public that she would not. She is not blacklisted. She is admired, and unhireable.Then a breaker on a rural feeder opens for eleven seconds and closes again with nobody's hand anywhere near it. Sixteen days later, a forty-six degree heatwave puts an islanded grid at maximum load.Iris does everything right. She reads it twice. She writes down what she cannot rule out. She declares her own conflict of interest before anyone thinks to ask, and she files inside the statutory window with her name at the bottom of it.Every fact in that document is true.Nothing this tidy has ever been true.And Jo, who has no badge, no job and no standing of any kind, is the one person alive who can see what is wrong with it, and cannot explain how she knows.For readers who like: - An established sapphic couple, and the sixteen days that find out what they are made of- Thirteen years between them, and neither of them willing to say so- Competence as a love language, on both sides of the same kitchen table- Romantic suspense where nobody runs anywhere, and the tension is whether the work is good enough- Structural inequality between two people who love each other, and no villain to blame it on- A Perth heatwave, four chooks, a neighbour with opinions, and a flat-pack shelf that has been in its box since 2022- British and Australian voices, and a house you could draw from memory by the endThis edition includes a bonus story. The Night Desk is the eleven days of Zero Trust told by Nadia Rahimi, the analyst who worked every one of those nights on her own, saw most of it first, and was believed last. Around 6,700 words, at the back of the book, and not sold separately.Purple Team, book two, set in Perth, Western Australia. It stands alone. Zero Trust is where Iris and Jo met, and you can start here without it.