Deep Water

Stripped of his private detective license and devastated by the murder of his partner Lily Truscott, Cliff Hardy travels to the U.S. to help Lily's brother's tilt for a world boxing title. In San Diego he suffers a heart attack and undergoes a quadruple bypass. He meets nurse Margaret McKinley, an expatriate Australian who is concerned about the disappearance in Sydney of her father—renowned geologist Dr. Henry McKinley. Hardy undertakes to investigate in association with Hank Bachelor, his former associate who now runs his own agency. It turns out that McKinley had discovered a way to tap into the massive Sydney basin acquifer, a possible solution to the city's water problems. Working with Margaret who visits Sydney, Bachelor, and his daughter, Megan, Hardy confronts an old enemy and contending forces bent on exploiting the discovery and prepared to kill for it. Energized by the case and by his attachment to Margaret, Hardy obeys the strict rules for the restoration of his health—but in pursuing the truth and the malefactors, he makes his own rules.

Still reeling from the shock death of his partner, Cliff suffers a heart attack - but this isn't enough to keep him from investigating the disappearance of the father of the woman nursing him back to health.

Publishers Weekly

At the start of this uninspired entry in Australian author Corris's long-running crime series featuring PI Cliff Hardy (Open File, etc.), Cliff wakes up after a serious heart attack in a San Diego hospital. Margaret McKinley, the good-looking Australian ex-pat nurse who aided in his recovery from a quadruple cardiac bypass, needs Cliff's assistance: her father, Henry, a geologist employed by a large corporation, has disappeared from his Sydney home. Cliff is glad to help, though he's lost his PI license. Back in Australia, Cliff finds that Henry's office and darkroom have been ransacked and, more disturbingly, that the missing man's seismologist friend, Terry Dart, was killed by a hit-and-run driver. The trail is as predictable as the burgeoning romance between Cliff and his client. Solid writing compensates only in part for a not particularly distinctive protagonist. (Nov.)

Peter Corris is best known as the father of Australian crime fiction and the author of Cliff Hardy detective stories. He is also the author of A Round of Golf: 18 Holes with Peter Corris and the coauthor of Fred Hollows: An Autobiography.