Sara Linton, medical examiner in the small town of Heartsdale, is called out to an apparent suicide on the local college campus. The mutilated body provides little in the way of clues - and the college authorities are keen to avoid a scandal - but for Sara and police chief Jeffrey Tolliver, things don't add up. Two more suspicious suicides follow, and a young woman is brutally attacked.
Private investigator Cliff Hardy tackles one of his most difficult cases yet in this gripping detective novel that finds him in the far southwestern suburbs of Sydney. When a journalist hires him to find Billie Merchant, a woman with incriminating information about media-giant Joanas Clement and who is being tracked by both Clement and Clement's rival, Barclay Greaves,
An old flame, Glen Withers, has come back into Cliff Hardy's life - but this time it's strictly business. Former policewoman Glen is now a PI too, and with a much classier clientele than Cliff's - she's been told 'money's no object' by her latest, a wealthy family from Sydney's eastern suburbs. Together, Cliff and Glen take on the case of Rodney St John Harkness, recent inmate of a mental institution and a recovering alcoholic with a murky, possibly murderous, history.
Cliff Hardy, with his PI license cancelled and his career in Sydney at an end, is preparing for a trip overseas. Cleaning out his office, he comes across an open file - an unresolved case from the 1980s. As he starts reading he's thrown back to his investigation of the disappearance of Justin Hampshire.
Still reeling from the shock death of his partner, Cliff suffers a heart attack - but this isn't enough to keep him from investigating the disappearance of the father of the woman nursing him back to health.
