This is the ninth book in the Nic Thorn & Associates series of invigorating investigations into scam busting and not so frivolous fraud attempts. The team have spent nearly five years dealing with the atrocious attempts of scammers and their dogged determination to blur the lines between right and wrong....
This time the team find themselves in Far North Queensland where "winter" is mostly a rumour told by southerners and are lying in the scrub at 4:19 a.m. questioning every life choice that led them to the stakeout on a cold, moonless night. Rose Palmer along with her mentor Nic Thorn, and their third wheel (and fourth coffee) Sandy Fraser, are watching an abandoned house near Charters Towers-allegedly empty, allegedly cursed, and definitely lacking indoor plumbing, when Rose reports a "dark grey fluffy shadow" - could it be a one-eyed drop-bear?
Up in Townsville, where deceased estates are being administered by one of the courts faster than a two-minute noodle, thanks to a dodgy judge and an over eager estate lawyer, with the sale proceeds beginning to vanish like socks in a tumble dryer, Nic puts out the call to his alphabetised contacts-Andy, Bandy, Candy and Dandy to give them a hand when one of the properties for sale goes up in flames.
Things escalate when the son of the gun lawyer ( and co-conspirator ) develops an enthusiastic relationship with fire (Molotov cocktails, "accidental" blazes, and the general belief that wind is legally responsible), Nic and Rose discover the scam's deeper rot: links to the old Russell Island land scandal and a judge's long-buried connection to the estate lawyer. The plot thickens further when the lawyers daughter, the Ponzi scheme queen currently residing in Wacol Prison-turns out to be tied to them all.
Add in Captain Marvin "Marvel" Piper, a fire investigator who keeps walking into crimes with the cheery confusion of a man who thought he was just there to talk about a cigarette butt, and Eleanor ( who refused to take Rigby as her married name ), who offer to help the team bring down the fraudsters.
As the net tightens, the real contraband is family history. The lawyer's cosy relationship with the local judge looks less like professional overlap and more like decades of mutual leverage which reaches all the way back to the land-scam, and a trip to Japan that should've stayed in photo albums.
With evidence mounting, the question becomes: how much longer can they keep up the con keep before it collapses like cards of confetti?
