A Steely Hart

Her mother, driving drunk, crashed the family car and killed her cousin Danny. Her mother disappeared from their lives. Her father gave her his own mother's maiden name — Steely — and it stuck.

Loss became the pattern. A tractor rollover took her father's leg; while she was away at boarding school, his depression ended in suicide. She took up competitive fighting sticks — half self-defence, half a way to manage her anger — studied nursing, and joined the Army.

In Afghanistan she defied orders and ran into an ambush zone to reach the wounded, saving Lieutenant Damian "Dace" Acefield, whose left arm had been severed by shrapnel. That bond is the axis of everything that follows.

Six years later she is a senior nurse at a Melbourne private hospital — until a man follows her home and attacks her in her own hallway. She fights him off, learns exactly who he is, packs her fighting sticks and goes hunting him at a remote coastal peninsula called The Neck. What she finds there is an old comrade, a cartel, and an explosives-obsessed boss called Booma.

The hunt runs through a fortified farm and an abandoned gold mine to the Port Melbourne docks, and finally to a luxury hotel on the Gold Coast, where Steely goes under as Julie Collins and follows the money — into a rigged boardroom, a corrupt private hospital, and a lawyer no one can touch. She will need every version of herself she has ever been: nurse, soldier, fighter, liar.