Carlton L. Gordy Boeken

A murder occurs during Tschaikosky's 1812 Overture being performed at the Sydney Opera House in Australia. The body is found by Aaron Worthington, a senior editor with the Sydney Morning Herald, and Jeff Spencer, an American freelance writer. This unusual murder in an unusual place has Aaron and Jeff again involved in assisting the local police with solving the mystery. Half a world away in western Kansas, wheat farmers Rachael and Del Kettering find themselves involved in a struggle to save their business from an insidious spread of crop destruction. The disease is spreading eastward and is consuming their young crop. The mix of ingredients in the mystery comes to include: nursery business competition in a northern suburb of Sydney, Australia; secret United States and Australian joint military operations; a weird computer nerd; secret plant collection operations in the jungles of Indonesia; wheat farming in the Darling Downs of western Queensland, Australia. The continued evolving friendship between Aaron Worthington and Jeff Spencer, along with the coordinated single focused efforts of Rachael and Del Kettering to save their crops, adds warm human relations to the resolution of the mystery of who killed Stanley Hatch and why.