Ratters' Moon

About this book

Danny Kirwan, twenty-three, stacks supermarket shelves by night in Penrith and avoids any room he can't walk out of. When the grandfather he hasn't spoken to in nine years dies on his opal claim at Lightning Ridge, Danny drives north for four days to sign papers and sell the gear. He finds the camp ransacked, an eighteen-thousand-dollar debt to a smiling opal buyer, a notebook in a script no one can read, and Les's foul-mouthed offsider Marnie, who swears the old man hid a fortune in black opal because thieves were tunnelling into his mine at night. The claim will lapse at the end of winter. The ratters come when the moon is dark. And whatever Les buried is twenty metres underground, in the one place Danny swore he would never go again.