The Silent Hills

A Kate Hayes Australian Outback Thriller

By: Phillip Strang

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

For fans of Jane Harper's THE DRY, Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad, and C.J. Box's conspiracy thrillers.

Three years after exposing Protocol Seven destroyed her career, Detective Inspector Kate Hayes thought the conspiracy was buried. She was wrong.

When Dr Robert Ashford is found dead in his Adelaide Hills home, the staged suicide fools everyone except Kate. Ashford was a Protocol Seven witness—one of the few who testified and survived. Or so Kate believed.

The USB drive Ashford left behind reveals the devastating truth: Protocol Seven wasn't the crime. It was the cover-up.

For fifteen years, Australian government agencies conducted illegal weapons testing on civilians. Electromagnetic devices in shopping centres. Chemical agents in water supplies. Biological experiments on isolated communities. At least forty-three people died. Their deaths were disguised as accidents, suicides, or natural causes. And Protocol Seven existed to identify and eliminate anyone who discovered the truth.

Now Kate's name is on the elimination list.

As she races to decrypt Ashford's evidence and expose the conspiracy, Kate discovers she's been under surveillance for four years—longer than she'd investigated Protocol Seven. Every case she's worked has been monitored. Witnesses she planned to interview disappeared. Evidence vanished in convenient accidents.

The conspiracy isn't just hunting her. They've been controlling her all along.

With a journalist's help and a data scientist in hiding, Kate must expose the weapons testing programmes before she becomes victim number forty-four. But the conspiracy is fragmenting, factions are turning on each other, and Kate doesn't know which government agencies she can trust.

In the Adelaide Hills, the silence hides fifteen years of murder, and Kate Hayes is about to shatter it—if they don't silence her first.