The 25th Cliff Hardy Novel.
'I reached gingerly to the back of my head and felt the blood in my hair and the tenderness underneath it. How do they check if a footballer's concussed? Ask him if he knows what day it is. I thought I did. I was pretty sure.'
An old flame, Glen Withers, has come back into Cliff Hardy's life - but this time it's strictly business.
Former policewoman Glen is now a PI too, and with a much classier clientele than Cliff's - she's been told "money's no object" by her latest, a wealthy family from Sydney's Eastern Suburbs. Together, Cliff and Glen take on the case of Rodney St John Harkness, recent inmate of a mental institution and a recovering alcoholic with a murky, possibly murderous, history. But Glen is also a recovering alcoholic - and the combination proves disastrous.
When Rod and Glen vanish, Hardy finds himself in a race against time to untangle Harkness' tortured past and find the pair. The trail leads up to the central coast and some of Sydney's best-known beaches. Will Cliff be in time, or will the "salty tang of blood" fill the air?
