Australia's past is littered with the broken dreams - and some skeletons - of fortune hunters digging for treasure.

Young Australian journalist Annie Bryce is on the run from a killer who wants her dead before she can testify at a murder trial. After one narrow escape too many she and photographer Steve are hustled out of town for their own protection. Lying low on the northern gemfields they meet the rockhounds: hand-miners who burrow underground for the world-class sapphires of Australia, intent on unearthing a gem to equal the stunning local stone now sitting on the President's desk in the White House.

Even here Annie's nose for mystery is twitching. In this isolated, eccentric community she soon realises that nothing is as it seems. Probing the secrets of a long-dead wheeler and dealer in sapphires, she once again discovers that there's no escaping the dark shadows of the past. All the while the killer on her trail is drawing ever closer, leaving death and destruction in his wake ... This is the sequel to 'Loose Ends'.

Print edition: ISBN 1-9211-810-5

E-book edition: www.smashwords.com/books/view/118415

ON LOCATION FOR ROCKHOUND

Pat always suspected that there could be a story in the forgotten communities of central Queensland's gemfields and their world-class sapphires. She knew she was right as soon as she started to poke around there.

At that time she had no idea she was capturing the dying days of this isolated society: a society that had rejected electricity and running water unti the 1970s, that still had nothing much in the way of modern facilities, that prided itself on its many outlaws.

Now work has started on an open-cut mine at Anakie - soon to be followed by communications, workers, accommodation, sports and commercial facilities and all the other trappings of civilization. Vale the unforgettable characters and lifestyles of the gemfields.