Rightful Inheritance - EBOOK AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER 30 NOVEMBER, 2025

In the heart of the unforgiving outback, Karin Baxter steps into the lion's den of PMB Pastoral, fully aware that her quest for justice might be her last. With a Royal Commission breathing down their necks, $400 million in daily exports, and the honor of one of Western Australia's most influential families on the line, the stakes couldn't be higher. Karin's only weapons are a crude map sketched on a beer coaster and the whispered tales from her father's knee.

 As she digs deeper into the secrets buried on her family's former land, she realizes that some will stop at nothing to keep the truth hidden. With powerful adversaries closing in and a corrupt judicial system stacked against her, Karin must navigate a treacherous path to reclaim her rightful inheritance. 

 Will she survive the relentless pursuit of those determined to silence her, or will the weight of power and corruption crush her fight for justice? In this high-stakes thriller, the line between right and wrong blurs, and the cost of truth may be more than Karin is willing to pay.

 

Chapter 1 – The Road Trip

Karin folded the washing and placed it in the two drawers beside the wardrobe in the van.

         “Everything in its place,” she murmured.

         It had been a while. Staying with Lukah had lulled her. But it was time to move on.

Lukah was sitting on the veranda watching her. Trouble was bashing zeds at his feet. The dog was almost as accusatory as her boyfriend. Except Lukah wasn’t her boyfriend. And this is not where she belonged.

         She sat on the bed. So much had happened she wasn’t quite sure where home was anymore. Her mother wasn’t talking to her and Uncle Bernie had long since headed back to the city. Their silence was deafening. With Jess on her honeymoon and  Bec taking time out after the chaos of the last few weeks Karin had nothing to do but enjoy the downtime. 

         Being here wasn’t permanent. It never had been. It wasn’t as if she and Lukah hadn’t discussed the ground rules.

         Why did doing the right thing have to feel so damn hard?

         Lukah was right when he said they were good together. But this is not where she was meant to be. Her trip didn’t end here. And now Jess was happily married it was time for Karin to make tracks.

         The van was packed, food stashed in various places under the seats in the cupboards. Water tanks filled. There was nothing left to do except say goodbye to the man who had come back into her life with such a forceful presence she wasn’t quite sure how she was going to leave again.

         She straightened her shoulders and pushed herself off the bed. And took the steps necessary to the door of the van and whistled to a dog. “Come on, Trouble. Time to go.”

         “This is it then?”

         She looked across at Lukah who made no move towards her. “It’s not as if it’s a surprise.”

         “I kind of hoped I could convince you without having to have a hard conversation.”

         “A conversation wouldn’t have helped,” she said sadly. “I need to do this. And before you ask, I need to do it alone.”

         “I’m not asking anything,” he said. “I’m making your promise.”

         “And what might that be,” she asked lightly, although the smile didn’t reach her eyes.

         “Promise me you’ll call if you need me.”

         Karin smiled softly. “I’m a big girl, Lukah. Please don’t hold me to that. It’s hard enough leaving as it is.”

         “Then don’t go.”

         She shook her head. “Trouble, in you get.”

         She watched as the dog looked mournfully at the man he had come to trust as if to apologise. Then he bounced down the steps, peed on the verandah and meandered over to the car before jumping into the passenger’s seat.

         Karin closed the door gently and attached his doggy seatbelt. All he needed was sunglasses and he would look like a real roadie.

         “So this is it then.” Lukah finally uncurled himself from the deck chair and came down the stairs to stand in front of her.

         Karin stepped in to his embrace and rested her head briefly on his chest. “It’s not forever. But please don’t wait for me.”

         “Free to choose. I remember.”

         “That goes for both of us.”

         He placed his hands on her shoulders and pushed her gently away so that he could look down and search her face. “I’ll be waiting.”

         Karin gave an exasperated sigh. “You do you and I’ll do me.”

         “That’s the idea, darlin.” He turned around and propelled her towards the driver’s door. “Up you get and do up your seatbelt like a good girl. I’ll try not to watch you leave.”

         She raised her hand gently to his lips with a finger-kiss. “It’s been good,” she said softly. “I don’t want to spoil it with promises of forever.”

         “Because we both know there is no such thing as forever, right?”

         “I’m not going to answer that.” As she climbed into the vehicle she wondered whether he had gifted her the spark of anger she needed to actually carry through with leaving him.

         By the time she settled into her seat, turned on the vehicle, checked the dog, and checked the revision mirror, she looked up one last time, but Lukah was gone. She lifted her hand off the steering wheel and gave a wave to the empty veranda. 

         “If I did believe in happily ever, you’d be the one I choose,” she whispered.

         She backed the vehicle out of the driveway and it took every in ounce of her strength not to kick the van into forward and drive straight back from where she had come.

         Whatever happen next, she knew it couldn’t be here and it couldn’t be now. There were still too many questions, least of all what the hell she was doing a dozen hours from the city and the life she left behind. 

         She was choosing to head further into the unknown. Alone except for her dog. And the Starlink communication that Lukah had insisted on buying for her. Humour me, he said, and it was the least she could do for the man who had been her childhood sweetheart and had come back into her life with such force, leaving him a second time was breaking her. She didn’t like how vulnerable it made her feel.

         “Broken promises,” she murmured. “It’s what makes the world go round.”

         She pulled over at the rest stop to fill her water tanks when suddenly the passenger’s door flung open.

         “In the back, Trouble,” a familiar voice said. “Lickety-split.”

         Karin finished topping up the water and wound up the hose.

         She moved to the driver’s door, settled into the driver’s seat and clipped her seatbelt. “Just dropping by to give us some cookies for the trip, I’m guessing”

         “Nope.”

         “Here to pat the dog one last time?”

         “Nope again.”

Karin sighed. “So that swag you slung in the back beside my dog is here for the road trip.”

Bec grinned. “You didn’t think you were getting out of town that easy, did you?”

         Karin drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “I was kind of hoping.”

         “Liar. You’re up for the company. Admit it.”

         Karin turned sideways and met her friend’s gaze with a sardonic look. “Rules of the road. Driver chooses the music. Passenger feeds the driver.”

         “Lucky the passenger packed an Esky that fits comfortably between passenger and driver so that said duo can munch happily all the way to the goldfields.”

         “Who said that’s where we’re going?”

         “That scrap of map you’ve been carrying around like a secret for the last two weeks. You don’t think we all didn’t know?”

         “Jess’s wedding was fun. It was great to be here. We’ve had our fun. And this is the point where I’m supposed to wave goodbye, and you cry daintily whilst wiping tears from the corner of your eyes with a lace hanky.”

         “In your dreams, dorko.” Bec settled comfortably in her seat. “Now, are we going to get this heap of junk on the road or are we going to hold up traffic?”

         Karin looked around her. At five-thirty in the morning there wasn’t a soul to be seen. And the road trains wouldn’t be a problem till they hit the Great Northern Highway.

         She sighed. “Buckle up. By my estimation we’ve got a six-hour drive ahead of us.”

         “Marble Bar, here we come.” Bec opened the esky and pulled out two coffees. “Coffee and pastries for the driver?”

         Karin gave into the inevitable. If there’s one thing she had learned about Bec in the last weeks was that her stubborn hadn’t gone away since their high school years. The same woman who had organised their best friend’s wedding on a dime had somehow gone home, packed a swag and was now sitting in Karin’s passenger seat like she had planned it all along.

         “I’m perfectly capable of doing this alone.”

         “That’s not what that handsome boyfriend of yours thinks. Call me a roving reporter. I report back to him that you’re safe and well and he’ll keep Arno and Toby honest till we get home.”

         “We? You seem sure that I’m coming back this way.”

         “Aren’t you? Something tells me there’s a little unfinished business between you and a certain policeman.”

         “I’ve got enough unfinished business to last me a lifetime.”

         “Look, let’s just go check out who stole your inheritance and why, and once I know you’re safe and sound I’ll skedaddle out of there. You can stay and set up house and whatever else you think you gonna do on a cattle station in the middle of nowhere with a dog that is about as useless as six toes when it comes to protecting you from rabid dingoes in the middle of nowhere.”

         “Leave Trouble out of it. He’s my Second-in-command, and you just booted him out of his seat where he’s supposed to be riding shotgun.”

         “Consider me shotgun and him the mutt in the back.”

         Karin groaned. Bec in protective mode was a pain in the arse. Secretly, Karin was glad of the company. It was a long drive. And, for the most part, an isolated one. She had done her due diligence and knew where the road was taking her.

         To the hottest part of Australia on roads that were questionable. Where men who didn’t want to be found resided, and where rifles rode under the front seat like they belonged.

         Bec was right about one thing. Karin and her brand-new Mercedes-Benz campervan would stick out like a pimple on an arse where they were headed. Most tourists got as far as the first waterfalls and maybe did a crossing or two. But her research and search of title deeds of PMB Pastoral stretched way beyond the black top.

         The place was pioneer country with capital P, where the historic telegraph line had stopped because it couldn’t push any further, not even with the engineering smarts of her great-great-grandfather.

         Karin was determined to at least see what had been stolen from her father by the big bad miners and their political allies.

         What had been a family cattle station had become just another bunch of mining lease numbers where the water allocation was more valuable than the land and the mining potential was more valuable than any number of cattle.

         The bastards who had sold her father out were using Windelema as a tiny part of a puzzle that filled in the dots on the vast landscape, but to Karin it could be the home that she never knew she was looking for.

         If home was a million miles from anywhere with facilities at Marble Bar the nearest town two hours away by a road so rough that she will be lucky to get the Mercedes sprinter across it. But she needed to do this.

         To heal.

         Something told her that Bec was along for the ride, not only as protector but to make sure Karin survived whatever it was that she found at the end of that corrugated road.

         “Audiobook or true crime podcast?”

         Karin looked sideways at her passenger. “You don’t think we’ve had enough true crime to last us for a while?”

         “Yeah. You’re probably right about that. But you never know. We might learn a trick or two to help us survive this latest harebrained scheme of yours. Even with Lukah back in Nameless and monitoring our every move, things have an awful lot of potential to go arse-up. A good true crime podcast should put us in the mood.” 

         Karin smiled. “In the mood?”

         “Yeah, you know. For a Nancy-Drew-eat-your-heart-out adventure. Two women hit the road looking for clues to God knows what. What clues are we looking for, again?”

         “I’m sorry to burst your sleuth bubble but this is a personal trip for personal reasons. I want to know where I came from. Some of the things Uncle Bernie said about his and Dad’s past have got me intrigued.”

         “So, you’re not a journalist on the scent of a story? Got it.”

         “Nothing like that.” Karin’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “More like a trip down memory lane. We kick over the footings of our old homestead that’s probably been eaten out with termites. We snap a picture or two. And we send them to Mum and Uncle Bernie. Then, we’ll drive right back out of there.”

         “But I packed all my paints. And a swimsuit. And left a note for my boys that I was riding off into the sunset, and to expect me when the dust settles. You sure know how to kill the romance.”

         “I don’t think there’ll be any romance. As far as my research shows, PMB Pastoral haven’t been doing much pastorally. They put cattle on the land, and they look after them as much as the law requires them to do, but it’s all about mining leases and water allocations for them. I’ll be surprised if anyone has been near the old homestead since it was sold out under Dad’s nose.”

         “But what if we find secret diaries and your great-great-granny’s hidden jewellery? Or better still, what if your great-great-grandfather hard-dug-for gold is buried in the cellar and we crack the code of an old safe and suddenly we’re catching nuggets with our bare hands?”

         “Then we’ll scoop up our gold and hightail it back to where we came from, and no one will be the wiser. Well, until we start splurging on international holidays to exotic locations, and fancy frocks that aren’t knock-offs of some designer we’ve never heard of.”

         “You have to spoil a girl’s dreams, don’t you.” Bec pulled the lid off their coffees and passed one to Karin. “If you gonna be a spoilsport and we haven’t even left town yet I think I’ll take my swag and go back to bed.”

         Karin flicked the child locks on the door. “Sorry. You had your chance. We are in this together now. Just like Bonnie and Clyde.”

         “Starsky and Hutch.”

         “Thelma and Louise.”

         The two women chuckled and Trouble gave a wolf from the back as Bec distributed the pastries. Trouble scored a corner of a Danish and stuck his head between their seats for more.

         “I hope you bought enough dog food for this thing because I don’t want to have to kill a kangaroo just to keep him in snacks.”

         “Look behind you,” Karin said. “You see the size of this thing, and now we’ve got an extra body – yours – and we’re all squeezed in together. We’ll stop at Hedland for supplies before heading out to Marble Bar.”

         “I’ve gone one better,” Bec said triumphantly. “What would you say if I’ve organised a food drop a week from now?”

         Karin groaned. “Let me guess. Jess will be back from her honeymoon, and you’ve roped her in on this escapade.”

         “She’ll  fly in with the chopper once she gets back, but Grayson laid down a few ground rules because of her delicate condition.”

         “She’ll be four months pregnant. That condition?”

         “Yeah. Apparently, we’ve gotta be sensible and mature and adult. Fucked up words if ever I heard ‘em.”

         Karin grinned. “Hit me with a podcast then go to sleep for a few hours. It’ll be your turn to drive.”