The Circle Opens

On her thirtieth birthday, investigative journalist Angel O'Connor wakes to a quiet morning on the Melbourne waterfront—until a nuclear-powered US aircraft carrier appears in the bay without explanation.

No announcements. No approvals. No answers.

As Angel digs deeper, she discovers the ship was never authorised to berth. Government agencies were bypassed. The media is muzzled. And the most powerful interview of her career has already been scripted to keep the truth off-air.

When Angel realises the broadcast is running on a delay designed to erase any unsanctioned question, she faces a choice that could end her career—or expose something far larger than a single warship. With help from a dangerous former intelligence operative, she prepares to collapse the buffer and ask the one question no one wants spoken live.

But power does not forgive public defiance.

Set against a modern Australia caught in the shadow of global military force, The Circle Opens is a tense political thriller about truth, control, and the personal cost of refusing to look away. Sharp, intimate, and relentlessly contemporary, it asks a single, dangerous question: what happens when someone finally says it out loud?