The once-peaceful beach resort of Bushrangers Bay, not far from Melbourne, is the site of multiple crimes that must be investigated by Homicide Squad Inspector Hal Challis of the Mornington Peninsula Police Force and his staff. A toddler is missing; an unidentified man is fished out of the sea with an anchor strapped to his waist; cars are being stolen and torched; letter boxes are being burned. And then one of Challis's own friends, Kitty Casement, who runs an aerial photography service and flies a Kittyhawk, is murdered. Figuring out the connections and identifying the criminals absorbs all the energy and intelligence of this cast of sympathetic but complicated policemen and women.

Disher grew up in South Australia. In 1978 he was awarded a creative writing fellowship to Stanford University, where he wrote his first short-story collection. A full-time writer for many years, he is the author of more than forty titlesfiction, children's books, anthologies, history textbooks, books about the craft of writing, and the Wyatt thrillers. The first Detective Inspector Challis murder mystery, The Dragon Man, won the German Crime Fiction Critics Prize 2002 and was published in the UK in 2006 by Bitter Lemon Press.