The Red Desert
(2025)(The first book in the Kate Hayes Australian Outback Thriller series)
A novel by Phillip Strang
The plane crashed forty years ago. The body inside died yesterday.
When Detective Sergeant Kate Hayes is called to a remote crash site near Coober Pedy, she expects wreckage and old bones. What she finds is a body that's fresh — a man in his sixties wearing a 1980s RAAF flight suit, carrying ID for a pilot declared dead in 1984.
The plane has been buried in red sand for decades. The victim has been alive until now. Someone kept him that way.
As Kate digs into military records and classified files, she uncovers traces of an operation the government never acknowledged — something that happened in the desert during the Cold War, something that required test subjects who wouldn't be missed.
Seventeen people vanished near Coober Pedy between 1982 and 1986. The files say natural causes, accidents, drifters moving on. Kate doesn't believe it. Someone turned missing persons into something else. And whoever ran that programme is still protecting it.
In the outback, secrets don't decay. They just get buried deeper.
For fans of Jane Harper, Chris Hammer, and Garry Disher.
Book 1 in the Kate Hayes series.
Genre: Mystery
When Detective Sergeant Kate Hayes is called to a remote crash site near Coober Pedy, she expects wreckage and old bones. What she finds is a body that's fresh — a man in his sixties wearing a 1980s RAAF flight suit, carrying ID for a pilot declared dead in 1984.
The plane has been buried in red sand for decades. The victim has been alive until now. Someone kept him that way.
As Kate digs into military records and classified files, she uncovers traces of an operation the government never acknowledged — something that happened in the desert during the Cold War, something that required test subjects who wouldn't be missed.
Seventeen people vanished near Coober Pedy between 1982 and 1986. The files say natural causes, accidents, drifters moving on. Kate doesn't believe it. Someone turned missing persons into something else. And whoever ran that programme is still protecting it.
In the outback, secrets don't decay. They just get buried deeper.
For fans of Jane Harper, Chris Hammer, and Garry Disher.
Book 1 in the Kate Hayes series.
Genre: Mystery
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