Lightning Bolt

Penny separated from her fiance a year ago. Then her mother died, and she lost her job as a reporter at the Flagstaff Tribune in Arizona. Her only family now is a half-sister in Ahipara, New Zealand, a woman she met just once when she was a gangly adolescent. But she decides to visit the exotic-sounding country to try and get her life back on track.She isn't there long before a body is discovered up on the gum fields – kauri gum from ancient forests – and her new friends insist that she use her reporter's skills to head their investigation.What did happen to Bethany Adams four years ago? And who is the ex-soldier calling himself Maric who lives in an old fishing shack on the dunes? Everybody calls him the night watchman, but his skills suggest he is much more than that.GOODREADS rating 4.08 from 12 reviews (Oct, 2025).

When Annabelle asks Penny to clear her niece Charlotte of embezzlement charges, Penny soon comes to believe that Charlotte is innocent. But she also has a hunch that there's something more tied to the theft at Dunbar Haulage – murder perhaps?She is in the early stages of the investigation when Maric invites her to The Grand Château at Mount Ruapehu for a weekend away, and the butterflies in her stomach start to multiply at an alarming rate.Then there's the New Caledonia op against a drug cartel. Major General Wilkins wants Penny on board as an observer, but first the Lightning team have to find a back country airstrip long enough to take a twin-engined jet – and that seems like an impossible task.