In 1992, toddler Yasmin Munoz went missing from a rainforest picnic spot near Cairns. No trace of her has ever been found. Yet in 2012 Andrew Todd, a wealthy businessman and former mayor of Cairns, dies, and leaves in his will directions for a search for the missing child, who if she is still alive must now be a young woman. Cairns detective Cass Diamond is soon asked to help with the search. But Cass sometimes exceeds professional boundaries... She discovers that in 1990, popular university student Chloe Campion had also gone missing, from a party in Brisbane celebrating her engagement to the son of Andrew Todd. Police inquiries at the time of the child's disappearance found no link with the Campion case. But Cass is curious... On her own, Cass delves deeper, and is led to a farm on the Atherton Tableland outside Cairns, where her curiosity gets her kidnapped with two other women, and into a hostage drama with an unpredictable assailant... Weaving together a story of race, ethnicity, environmental politics and intrigue, Caroline de Costa again sets her heroine in the lush rainforest, the sparkling seas and the solitary inland country of North Queensland that she knows so well. The story twists and turns, leaving the reader guessing, then guessing again, about the fates of Yasmin and Chloe...

Author Biography

Caroline de Costa was born and brought up in Sydney. After travelling and working in Europe, the Middle East and South America, including a stint in the Swedish Merchant Navy, she studied medicine in Dublin. She has practised as a doctor in the area of women's health since 1973 and is now Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at James Cook University College of Medicine in Cairns, where she lives. She has always had a strong interest in the improvement and provision of services for women's reproductive health. Since 1992 she has published many books to provide information for women about their health and health needs, as well as medical text books. De Costa has also always been an avid reader of crime fiction and in 2015 published her first crime fiction novel. Missing Pieces is the second novel in the series featuring Cairns Aboriginal detective Cass Diamond, and is a sequel to Double Madness, which was shortlisted in the Davitt Awards in 2016. De Costa brings her experience of the people and institutions of Far North Queensland, as well as her deep knowledge of medicine, and of the lush but sometimes unforgiving reef and rainforest country of the region.