In this mesmerizing first novel, a young American graduate student abandons her research deep in the Australian rain forest to investigate her professor's mysterious disappearance. Annabel Mendelssohn has an unusual but oddly satisfying life - studying spectacled fruit bats in the rain forest of Australia. She spends her free time discovering waterfalls and e-mailing her sister, Alice, who has settled for the more domesticated science of grant administration....

"His Illegal Self is the story of Che - raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother, he is the precocious son of radical student activists at Harvard in the late sixties. Yearning for his famous outlaw parents, denied all access to television and the news, he takes hope from his long-haired teenage neighbor, who predicts, They will come for you, man, They'll break you out of here." "Soon Che too is an outlaw: fleeing down subways, abandoning...

"When former police detective Ted Conkaffey was wrongly accused of abducting Claire Bingley, he hoped the Queensland rain forest town of Crimson Lake would be a good place to disappear. But nowhere is safe from Claire's devastated father. Dale Bingley has a brutal revenge plan all worked out -- and if Ted doesn't help find the real abductor, he'll be its first casualty. Meanwhile, in a dark roadside hovel called the Barking Frog Inn, the bodies of...

"Crimson Lake is where people with dark pasts come to disappear-and where others vanish into thin air... Four young boys are left alone in a hotel room while their parents dine downstairs. When Sara Farrow checks on the children at midnight, her son is missing. Distrustful of the police, Sara turns to Crimson Lake's unlikeliest private investigators-disgraced cop Ted Conkaffey and convicted killer Amanda Pharrell. For Ted, the case couldn't have come...

In 1871 Boston, feisty independent socialite Rebecca Williams meets Aussie Daniel Thornton. He courts her and proposes. Though she has some doubts about dealing with relocating to Australia and not loving Daniel, she accepts because she is fond of him, respects his kindness towards people and lacks money to maintain her current American lifestyle; she hopes to one day love her husband and looks forward to increased freedom Down Under.

Fire has swept through Douloo Station, destroying everything in it's path. With his family and servants living in a tent, Daniel finds himself frustrated and at the end of his rope. He appeals to the banker in Thornton Creek for a loan, but because he has no collateral the banker refuses to loan the money. Daniel turns to a shady character in Brisbane for a loan, putting up the station itself as collateral. Even though he feels in his gut it's not...