For Aaron Falk, going back home is not going to be easy. After all, with the area facing an extreme drought, everyone is in a constant state of alert. It is against this strange backdrop that Falk stumbles into a mystery that is four decades old. Many years ago, a teenage girl died under mysterious circumstances. And the more that Falk investigates this cold case, the more he realizes that it may have something to do with the town's more recent tragedies....

In northern Australia at the beginning of World War II, an English aristocrat inherits a cattle station the size of Maryland. When English cattle barons plot to take her land, she reluctantly joins forces with a rough-hewn stock-man to drive 2,000 head of cattle across hundreds of miles of the country's most unforgiving land, only to still face the bombing of Darwin, Australia, by the Japanese forces that had attacked Pearl Harbor only months earlier....