Dennis is glad to be back at work. His wife’s death left him devastated but he’ll do anything to lose himself into work at the Inspector General’s office of the CIA. A brilliant, if prickly investigator, he’s spent his career chasing down the Agency’s thieves and liars. When his boss forces him to take a low-level assignment to investigate a missing employee in Australia, he soon finds that even in the red dust of the Outback, there is romance – and death – just a sweltering heartbeat away.

A long-distance love affair is tough enough when a man and woman are separated by a couple of oceans and thirteen time zones. But when Australian Federated Police agent Judy White and CIA investigator Dennis Cunningham meet in London to decide whether their strained romance can continue, some very dark things happen. They discover that there is no force more ferocious and unforgiving than revenge. Dennis and Judy must fight separate heroic battles to discover if they have a future together. Love and death are linked, and darkly so.

A missing tourist is just the beginning. An American woman vanishes in New Zealand. There is no body, no witness and no explanation. But what looks like a sad, unfortunate case of foul play, slowly turns into something darker. The missing tourist is a female psychologist under contract from the CIA to see employees in strictest confidence. Was her disappearance a random act of violence, or an act of international espionage? Does someone want to know her patients’ dark, dirty secrets? Dennis Cunningham, the gruff but uncanny CIA investigator, is tugged out of early retirement in Western Australia to rubber stamp a foregone conclusion by the agency. A brilliant but unusual sleuth, Cunningham needs the help of his resourceful Australian cop girlfriend to bail him out of a dangerous deceit.

CIA veteran Dennis Cunningham is lured out of early retirement by the Australian intelligence service to investigate the disappearance of a foreign spy. His girlfriend Judy, an Australian police inspector, has her own challenges dealing with a family crisis and job stresses. In a twist, Dennis and Judy find themselves entangled in each other's investigations, leading to a shocking conclusion about the dark side of governments—and people.