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Informationen zum Autor Hannah Nyala' s experience as a Search and Rescue tracker in the United States brings a gritty realism and emotional depth to the action-packed fictional adventures of Tally Nowata. Her previous Tally Nowata novel, Leave No Trace, is available from Pocket Books, as is her highly acclaimed memoir, Point Last Seen, which was made into a CBS-TV movie starring Linda Hamilton. She is currently at work on her next Tally Nowata novel. Visit her website at www.pointlastseen.com . Klappentext Tally Nowata has saved many lives as a search and resuce worker. In the mountains of her home, she is an expert at survival. But in the Australian outback, she is only a tourist -a tourist whose boyfriend, Paul, went to pick up his daughter and never came back. He has been missing for six days, leaving Tally stranded in the unforgiving wasteland of the Tanami desert. She sets out to find him only to discover that he has been murdered and his daughter left to die. Tally knows that it's only a matter of time before his killers find the camp she left behind and the arrow pointing out her direction. She is grieving, tired, and bitterly aware that she knows too little about this land, only bits and pieces of information that Paul had given her. But there is nothing to do but go on, carrying Paul's memory and his daughter with her in a desperate struggle for survival. Chapter One: Day 1 I worked my first search for the National Park Service the day I turned nineteen, and found my first dead body three days later. Her name was Loren Blair, young and athletic and as good on a mountain as anybody ever gets -- a first-rate climber in a class of her own -- but she wasn't climbing the day she disappeared. She was simply out for her morning run, tall and blond and beautiful as always, looking more like a model than a nature rat, when she stepped off the trail, slipped, and fell to her death. Five days passed before anyone even reported her missing. I didn't get to her till two weeks later, far too late to do anything but call in the 11-44 and bag the body for transport and try desperately not to throw up in the process. Loren no longer looked like a model or a climber. She belonged to the dead, not the living. Nothing and no one could bring her back. This is the bitter edge of the work I do. The smell of death never lets up. The next day the Chief Ranger made me a permanent part of the Windy Point Search and Rescue Team, and since then I've been stationed in the Grand Tetons, mountains that draw plenty of people who are a lot less prepared and fit than Loren Blair was. I've been trained to rescue these people, dead or alive, clothed or not, in all kinds of situations and all kinds of weather. I can rappel off a rock face carrying a grown man and do a solo rope rescue without backup, if needed. I can ski an injured climber off a pass in a blizzard and control the descent. I have been well trained to do these things. But I have not yet been trained to deal with myself at the smell of a three-week-old corpse. They can't train you for something like that. And I certainly wasn't trained for this. Nobody can train you to die. My name is Tally Nowata and this morning, for the first time since I was ten, I remember my dreams. I dreamed of rain and then of dying and then of rain again and woke in a cold blind sweat, reaching for my half-finished net like a drowning person lunges for a line except my net was on hot sand instead of water. Red desert sand that hasn't seen rain in at least a year to boot -- which puts the lie to the wet part of my dream and punches the death part home. Hard. It's the bird, the songbird, that brought me to this, not the situation, not the sand, not the fear, not even the raging hunger. It's just the bird. My very own personal last straw...
