Stolen Dreams (Hannah Tree: Private Detective Book 3)

A missing actress. A shattered detective. A secret school hiding monstrous crimes.

Hannah Tree is barely holding it together. Shaken by a past case and haunted by fears she might have blood on her hands, she’s pulled back from her once-thriving detective work and now hides in the wings at the Starr Follies theatre. But when a young actress, Eliza Mount, begs for help and then vanishes, Hannah is pulled into a spiraling web of danger she can’t ignore.

From a stalker targeting her theatre colleagues, to a 92-year-old client convinced her daughter-in-law wants her dead, Hannah is suddenly juggling far more than she can handle. As her trusted friend Damian infiltrates a mysterious rural acting school tied to the missing, what he uncovers is darker than anything they imagined—forced pornography, blackmail, and deadly coverups.

When betrayal cuts close to home and a member of her own family descends into violence, Hannah must battle through trauma, secrets, and the edges of her own sanity to protect those who need her. Because this time, justice might come at the cost of her own survival.

STOLEN DREAMS is the third emotional, tightly-woven mystery in Deirdre Oliver’s gripping Hannah Tree series.

Start reading Stolen Dreams today and follow Hannah into the shadows—where truth is dangerous, and survival means facing what you fear most.

Excerpt from the book

When the racket from my phone finally cut through the cacophony of the rehearsal I was ready to bite a piece out of it. And it was an unknown number. I opened my mouth to speak but was stopped right there.

`Is that Hannah Tree?’ a child’s voice whispered.

`Yes…who—’

`Please help me. Somebody’s trying to kill me.’

`Pull the other one,’ I snapped and hung up. Some stupid kids having a laugh was more that I could deal with. When it rang again I turned it off. I had more than enough on my plate, including accommodating the strident caterwauling that passed for music in this travesty of a theme for the next show.

Heavy rock was never my thing. So I blamed that for my perennial bad temper. It was really because I couldn’t come to terms with discovering I was a killer. I tried to kid myself by saying that it was the choice of a rock opera theme for a drag theatre that had me on a hair trigger. But it wasn’t. Even so, these last dark weeks of the thumping music pounding into my head hadn’t helped. If I did cross the line, I’d claim provocation.

The last two shows had been spectacular successes and in keeping with the normal traditions of drag theatre. `Fred and Ginger’ was soft and lyrical, and while the current Spanish epic was noisy, castanets and acoustic guitars were rhythmic and tuneful. My boss Gloria’s experiences when she was in Spain recovering from her gender re-assignment surgery gave birth to it and I could hide my darkness behind her six-foot five frame swanning around in red frills, mantillas and flapping fans.

Amid the smiling faces and tapping feet of a chorus of dancing boys in fishnets, nobody noticed how far I’d pulled away from the everyday world. Gloria had eyed me sideways a few times, but she put my surliness down to the stress and shock of nearly being killed by a psychopath.

She was right. That was at the root of it. But not the way she thought. What was, was that when I had a knife at Crispin Kennedy’s throat I was going to kill him. The only thing that saved him was Gloria grabbing my hand and taking the knife. I was sure she was well aware that I was a killer and kept her council for her own reasons. But I really didn’t care. I knew. I also knew that I could never talk about it to a soul.

After I was eight years old I knew that. Tell anyone your troubles and they decide what happens to you. What you want is irrelevant.

But that wasn’t the only reason I kept quiet. The murderous Kennedy was a hotshot lawyer who had managed to keep some of his mates around him. He got sent down for life for the murder of a security guard, but with good behaviour could be out years earlier. Knowing the charm he could churn out even when he was about to slit your throat he’d be back on the streets in half his allotted time.