The Orphan's Goddaughter

Ian Lombard is no-one's idea of a vigilante. A career truck driver, on the wrong side of sixty and recently forced into retirement, he accepts that the good life is not something he can aspire to. Dying well is about the best he can hope for. Then a chance encounter shocks him out of his gloomy self-absorption. A goddaughter he never knew he had was fatally injured when she tried to intervene between a drug dealer and a vulnerable friend. Lombard—who wasn't always a truck driver—has a history and a talent that very few people know about and decides that karma needs a hand. Detective Superintendent Davina Blackley looks exactly what she is: an experienced, diligent and competent high-ranking police officer. She is tasked by the Commissioner to do something about the Cadre, a shadowy organisation that is behind most of the drug deals in Perth. She is determined to bring the people responsible for the young girl's death to justice, but she is hamstrung by the lack of evidence and the absence of any real intelligence about the cadre and makes a critical mistake. Lombard has no access to the little information the police have about the Cadre. He has no-one to help him and no authority to do anything. But balancing this is the fact that he is unencumbered by the constraints of the Criminal Investigation Act. He doesn't have to worry about procedural fairness, rules, regulations or even personal scruples, so he sets out to do something and, in the process, creates havoc.