Author(s): Gabrielle Lord

Australian Crime

When Sally Jones woke up on the eighth of May, she knew at once that something unpleasant lay head of her. The Inspector would be visiting her class the next day, and Sally wasn't ready. To add to that, she was afraid she might be pregnant. For the hundredth time, she asked herself what she was doing in this quiet little hamlet three hundred miles from the nearest city. At school the morning began well enough. The children were cooperative, ready to help prepare for the Inspector's visit. Then, without warning, the rural peace was brutally shattered by the appearance of a grotesquely masked figure. A sinister and sadistic gang of kidnappers had chosen the remote one-room schoolhouse as their target. They palnned to ask a cool million dollars in ransom. An ordeal of terror had begun for Sally and her class, who were imprisoned by their captors in an underground cave.