Old Broadbrim Into the Heart of Australia

A killer who strikes before midnight. A detective bound by a bargain sealed in blood. A trail that leads to the ends of the earth.

Old Broadbrim has seen dark corners of the human soul, but nothing quite like this. When the millionaire Custer Kipp summons him to a Fifth Avenue mansion and offers a staggering twenty-five thousand dollars to guard his life for one year, the famous Quaker detective senses something deeper than fear in the man's eyes. Something ancient. Something merciless.

He accepts. The bargain is barely cold when Kipp turns up dead—strangled in his own library, hours before his sixty-fourth birthday.

Now Old Broadbrim holds the only clues worth anything: a torn fragment of a letter signed Merle Macray, postmarked Perth, West Australia, and a photograph of a man whose face has haunted Kipp for twenty years. The murderer is already at sea, running hard for London with a Scotland Yard shadow at his heels.

Old Broadbrim follows. Across the Atlantic. Through the fog-choked streets of London. And beyond—toward the burning red heart of Australia, where a ruthless vendetta stretches back decades and the desert swallows men whole.

He carries one talisman: a four-leaved clover pressed into his palm by a frightened young woman who believes he cannot fail.

He is not so certain.

Can Old Broadbrim close in on a killer who has half the world's wilderness to disappear into?