Gilt Edge

Out there, suddenly pressed against a porthole, was Kolly. He wasn't swimming. He was dancing - a slow dance as the tide pushed him in. Around his neck was knotted cord. He was dead.

Odd fish and Sometime Journalist Alexander Kolnachov disappears from his home,a bizarre wax museum in Cairns. He bobs up doing his macabre dance of death before horrified tourists in an underwater observatory off Queensland's Coral Island. The police dismiss him as just another dead dero. But Kolly had been scared - scared to death.

Kolly's oldest mates, Ted Craig and Peter Lawson, know that he was hoarding documents on a 1946 treason trial in Australia. Alarm bells sound back to the Kempeitai torture cells in Japan's POW camps - and to Sam Kellerman, a wartime murderer and collaborator with the Japanese, who disappeared after the trial.

Now it seems Kellerman is back, collaborating with the Japanese on a different front - 'Rolling Thunder' a massive scheme to launder vast sums of Japanese Mafia money while picking the eyes out of Australia.

Old evils seep into the present as violence explodes again in the tropical north. The Japanese invasion, delayed in the Coral Se and at Midway, is advancing on all fronts. But what can Craig and Lawson do? Stop history?