Admission Price

At a travelling night market in rural New South Wales, the lanterns burn gold, the music boxes hold impossible tunes, and nobody charges admission.

On the way out, the Gate takes the best moment of your night.

You won't remember losing it.

Forensic accountant Wren Halloway returns after her mother's death intending to settle the estate and close the family market. Instead, she inherits a ledger that writes itself, debts stretching back two centuries, and an old groundskeeper who knows far more than he will tell her.

Wren knows how to follow a discrepancy. But every answer makes the accounts worse. The lanterns are going dark. Something beneath the market is stirring. And in the towns it leaves behind, ordinary grievances are turning cruel.

By the longest night of the year, Wren must restore the balance or surrender the market to a rival whose books reconcile perfectly-and whose methods she has every reason to fear.

Her mother tried to find another way. Someone cut the attempt out of the ledger.

To finish what she started, Wren will have to discover what the market owes, who has been paying, and whether the people she loves can be trusted to let her choose the price.

Admission Price is an Australian dark fantasy about stolen joy, inherited obligations, and the difficult work of caring for people you cannot forgive.