9. Jack seems to think there is enough evidence to charge Snow in relation to the disappearance of her sister. Do you agree? What would the charge be? How well does the evidence against her stack up?

10. Imagine that you were a juror at Snow’s trial. Would you be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that Snow is guilty of murder?

Also by the Author

NO PLACE LIKE HOME

Shortly after 9.30 in the morning, a young man walks into Surf City, Bondi’s newest shopping complex. He’s wearing a dark grey hoodie – and a bomb around his neck.

Just a few minutes later he is locked in a shop on the upper floor. And trapped with him are four innocent bystanders.

For police chaplain Paul Doherty, called to the scene by Superintendent Boehm, it’s a story that will end as tragically as it began. For this is clearly no ordinary siege. The boy, known as Ali Khan, seems as frightened as his hostages and has yet to utter a single word.

The seconds tick by for the five in the shop: Mitchell, the talented schoolboy; Mouse, the shop assistant; Kimmi, the nail-bar technician; and Roger Callaghan, the real estate agent whose reason for being in Bondi that day is far from innocent.

And of course there’s Ali Khan. Is he the embodiment of evil, as the villagers in his Tanzanian birthplace believe? Or just an innocent boy, betrayed at every turn, who just wants a place to call home?

Read on for an extract . . .

Chapter One

I can’t have been in bed for much more than an hour when I heard what sounded like a woman screaming. I wasn’t particularly worried, mainly because it wasn’t a particularly loud or frantic scream. Also, the sound was coming from my bedroom, so I knew it couldn’t be coming from a real woman. I might have been a normal, red-blooded heterosexual man but I’d never had a woman in my bed.

The obvious explanation was that the sound was not a scream but a ringtone, and that it was coming not from a woman but from my mobile telephone, somewhere under the pile of clothes on my bedroom floor.

Just so you know, I wouldn’t personally set my ringtone to sound like the shower scene from Psycho but I had spent the night on the streets with some kids who would certainly have done so. I was in those days employed as what’s known as a ‘chaplain’ – technically, that means I was a priest, linked not to any particular parish but to the New South Wales police force. One of my key responsibilities was to spend every second night serving Cup-a-Soup to kids in the Cross. Most were as tough as nails – they’d have teeth rotten down to the nerve and they’d treat it with alcohol – yet still innocent enough to take my phone when I wasn’t looking and change the ringtone to something like a frog croaking or a duck quacking or, in this case, a woman screaming; probably in the hope it would go off during mass and embarrass me.