Dead Track
Dr. Alistair Finch has spent thirty years reading the story told by rock, but nothing in his geology textbooks prepares him for what his drill brings up near the MacDonnell Ranges: a rich, concentrated vein of gold where the strata insist none should exist. Worse, the site has already been worked. Someone with professional rigs has been extracting ore in secret, and Finch is now the only outsider who knows. Aboard The Ghan, the legendary train that cuts across the Australian Outback from Darwin to Adelaide, Finch carries his samples in a locked suitcase and his doubts in a worn notebook. He means to file an honest report. Then Michael Vance, an executive with the powerful TerraFirma Mining, sits down at his table and makes an offer that is also a warning. When Finch is found dead in his locked compartment, the killing timed to the roar of the Finke River bridge, Inspector Jack faces an impossible crime on a moving train. The corridor cameras show no one entering or leaving. The passengers all have alibis. The evidence all seems to point nowhere. But a coffee cup that trembles to a rhythm no train can make is about to lead Jack off the rails and into a conspiracy where gold, greed, and silence run deep. Some tracks, once laid, cannot be uncoupled.
The red earth stretched to the horizon, a vast, unbroken expanse of ochre and rust under a sky so blue it hurt to look at. From the window of The Ghan, the Australian Outback didn't so much pass by as unfold-slow, deliberate, timeless. The train moved with a steady rhythm, steel wheels on steel tracks, a mechanical heartbeat in the ancient silence. It was a journey through geological time, through a landscape that had seen oceans come and go, mountains rise and erode, life forms evolve and vanish. And now, this train, this human intrusion, carrying its cargo of stories and secrets across a land that kept its own counsel. Dr. Alistair Finch adjusted his glasses and leaned closer to the window, though there was nothing to see but more of the same. He'd been staring at the landscape for hours, but his mind wasn't on the scenery. It was on the samples in his suitcase, the core samples he'd collected from the remote site near the MacDonnell Ranges.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
