About this ebook
Three years later, Annella is confronted with the man who broke her heart and destroyed her world. Against her will, and for the sake of her small sons and the safety of her family, she must allow him back into her life and worse, into her home but Annella swears to keep him at arm’s length … and never trust him again.
SARCIS Detective Senior Sergeant, Mitchell Fallon, is forced to face the consequences of his betrayal and abandonment of Annella MacAdam when he is directed to work on her property to locate stolen livestock and bust a gang of reivers.
When Annella’s father is released from prison, the crime wave intensifies. A steer, slaughtered by Midnight Butchers, a spy drone targeting Annella, ice and a restless ghost become features of Mitchell’s investigation.
Conflicted by a resurgence of harrowing memories and emotions, Annella and Mitchell form an uneasy alliance as they deal with a small community wracked by drought, debt and drugs.
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About the author
Queenslander, Jill Staunton, was born into a farming family. As a child, she was raised west of Rockhampton near Baralaba on a Hereford cattle and cotton property memorable for its brown snakes, goats and bales of wispy cotton.
Many school holidays were spent on her grandparents’ dairy, sheep and crop farm. Here, her grandfather taught her to align fence posts by eye and to offside in the dairy and shearing shed whilst her grandmother taught her to stew apricots fresh from the orchard. The fun was in eating the fruit then counting the seeds to her grandmother’s rhymes – tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, silk, satin, cotton, rags.
As a teenager, Jill spent time on Yaramulla, the ironbark and speargrass Brahman cattle property her parents owned (later declared a national park and the site of the Undara Lava Tubes) then on Boonamin, a property where her parents bred Brangus cattle.
Although she left the outback to teach English and History, Jill attributes her love of language to her grandmother and mother and her love of writing Outback fiction, Australian historical romance and poetry to her rural Australian upbringing. Jill resides in Townsville with her husband.
