Opal

A small mining community. A murderer at large. And a flood that has trapped them all.

DS Lucas Walker is off duty. His young half-sister Grace is visiting from Boston, and he's supposed to be spending time with her at his home in Caloodie in outback Queensland. But instead they've driven 400 kilometres west to the tiny mining town of Kanpara to pick up Walker's cousin Blair, who's been digging for boulder opals and is suddenly very keen to get out. It's not like Blair to quit so easily. Walker has the definite sense that something is off.

On their arrival, the atmosphere is already tense with rumours of a life-changing opal discovery. The following day, they awake to find that Kanpara has been completely cut off by a flood and the roads will be closed for days. As they take in their predicament, Blair receives a shocking phone call.

A man and a woman have been found brutally murdered.

The murdered woman's husband is an immediate suspect, but Walker isn't convinced. Could the killings be connected to the rumoured opal find? When the police take Blair in for questioning, the stakes couldn't be higher for Walker. He must now work with his fellow officers to uncover the killer in the community's midst before the waters recede and make escape possible. Can he unravel the mystery quickly enough to save his cousin and keep Grace safe?

The thrilling third instalment in the bestselling DS Lucas Walker series, Opal is full of breathtaking twists and dark turns.

About the Author

Patricia Wolf has been a journalist for more than 15 years, a regular contributor to titles including The Guardian, the Financial Times, The Independent and The Telegraph, among others. She grew up in outback Australia, in a mining town called Mount Isa in far north-west Queensland - eagle eyed readers will have spotted a small reference to it in her first book, Outback. Patricia loves the rugged beauty, indigo sky and wide horizons of the outback, but left Australia after university to travel the world and became a journalist. She lives in Berlin, Germany, but the outback always calls her home. In 2019, just before the covid pandemic locked us all in, Patricia spent two months in northwest Queensland, taking a four-week road trip. As she drove and spent nights and days surrounded by the beauty and rugged harshness of the outback, DI Lucas Walker and his stories came to be.