"The seventh installment in Garry Disher's celebrated Challis and Destry procedural series, set in Australia A pair of hit men working a job for a meth kingpin have a very bad day, and the resulting bushfire draws attention to a drug lab and two burned bodies in a Mercedes. Sergeant Ellen Destry--newly minted head of her department's sex crime unit--and Inspector Hal Challis return in this newest installment of Garry Disher's Peninsula-based crimes...

Summer on the Peninsula. The heat's ramping up, the usual holiday madness building. D.I. Hal Challis is already recycling his shower water and starting to dread Christmas. But this year there's something more. Women abducted and murdered on the Old Highway. A pall of fear over the scorched paddocks. The media are demanding answers - and Challis's sleepy beat is set to explode.

"The young detectives think Alan Auhl is washed up, but that doesn't faze him. He does things his own way--and gets results. He still lives with his ex-wife, off and on, in a big house full of random boarders and hard-luck stories. And he's still a cop, even though he retired from Homicide some years ago. He works cold cases now. Like the death of John Elphick--his daughters are still convinced he was murdered; the coroner is not so sure. Or the skeleton...

A modern western set in an isolated Australian bush town with a soaring crime rate, where a local constable with a troubled past must investigate the death of a teenage girl whose murder threatens to set the dusty streets ablaze.

A modern western set in an isolated Australian bush town with a soaring crime rate, where a local constable with a troubled past must investigate the death of a teenage girl whose murder threatens to set the dusty streets ablaze.