"I was about to punch in the number when a man loomed up beside me. When I say loomed I mean loomed - he was tall and wide with a shaven head, and the pale hand that plucked the mobile from my grasp and threw it away was super-sized. 'Hey,' I protested. He just stood there, a pace away now - a hundred kilos of bone and muscle in T-shirt and jeans. I had a gun and a tyre iron and I thought I'd need both to make an impression on him, but they were in the car. For now, it was just me!"
A growing number of old men are suspiciously dying one by one, and P.I. Cliff Hardy soon pieces together the one thing they each have in common--the Sydney Harbor Bridge. The troubled waters beneath the city's bridge have become a serial killer's battle ground, and Hardy must decipher the motive in order to catch up with the madman.
Cliff Hardy is flattered to be offered the job as head of security at the new Sydney casion. But the thought of office hours and wearing a suit put him off and he refuses in favour of his friend, Scot Galvani. When Galvani is murdered and the police are indifferent and the widow pleads with Hardy to help, how can he refuse? In the course of his investigation he takes the job at the casino, meets the attractive but unpredictable Vita Drewe and adds to his list of enemies. Galvani's killers are closer to home than Hardy anticipated; his life is on the line and so is his relationship with Glen Withers.
Cliff Hardy rubs elbows with Sydney's blue bloods in his latest case, involving murder threats received by a woman filing for divorce. The clues explode when the Australian private eye stumbles upon the high society husband and his mistress--just as the house bursts into a fireball. Now Cliff is fighting for his life on a trail guarded by a snarling dog and smoldering family ties.
When Oscar Bach's body is found crushed under the rubble, his death is classified as another tragic statistic of the Newcastle earthquake. So how could he have been seen alive five minutes after the quake? Cliff Hardy is hired to find the answers.
