Text have recently released SHOOTING STAR - originally published in 1999 and re-reading it is absolutely no chore whatsoever.
"The house was in a street running off Ballarat Road. Doomed weatherboard dwellings with rusting roofs and mangy little patches of lawn faced each other across a pocked tarmac strip. At the end of the street, by the feeble light of a streetlamp, two boys were kicking a football to each other, uttering feral cries as they lost sight of it against the almost-dark sky."
Frank Calder - ex-soldier and sacked police hostage negotiator - is just eking out a living as a mediator when he's approached by Pat Carson, patriarch of the dynastic Carson family. Pat wants him to deliver ransom money to kidnappers who've abducted his great-granddaughter, Anne. Frank urges Pat to call in the law, but he refuses, since police bungling nearly cost the life of another Carson child kidnapped years before. So a reluctant Frank begins to deal with the kidnappers, and quickly becomes convinced that both Carson kidnappings were motivated by something other than money.
Over several feverish days, Frank searches for suspects in the web of Carson family businesses and deals, marriages and indiscretions, rivalries and intrigues. And all the while he knows that if his instincts are wrong the girl will surely die...