It is 1999 and Kosovo refugee Niana Bolsa is abandoned by the Serbs to fend for herself in the mountains. In freezing temperatures, the distraught woman staggers along an empty road through virgin snow. At the point of near collapse she comes across a tractor and trailer by the roadside with two terrified children hiding there. Their grandparents have been shot and mother taken away. Determined to save the children, Niana takes them and heads for Albania. With all records destroyed, nobody queries her right to the children and they emigrate to New Zealand Matt Coleman is attracted to the new tenant of his New Zealand shop, Niana Bolsa, when she opens a food bar adjacent to his antique and furniture factory. Niana is reluctant to commit herself beyond friendship and says little about her life. Eventually, friendship between Niana and Matt blossoms into passionate love as they and Niana"s foster children become a family. But the terror so prevalent in Niana"s past surfaces again…with a vengeance.

In 865AD Vikings attack the female Bramingham Monastery in the Kingdom of Northumbria. The building is looted with everything of value taken by the pagans, Abbess Jane and senior nuns are slaughtered and the younger nuns abducted into slavery. Maiden Kendra, minding the monastery sheep on the top plateau during the attack survives. This is her story. One other survivor, postulant Jolene finds her and together they return to the monastery. Secrets are discovered that both help and hinder, including secret tunnels, a mine and evidence of clandestine trading with Vikings. Refugees from an nearby village are welcomed but Kendra is raped by one of the villagers and finds her feelings confused. A knight from the King"s army arrives but is as ruthless as the Vikings. He is driven from Bramingham but places the monastery under siege. With winter coming there is every chance that they will be starved into submission. One night, Kendra awakens to see a Viking standing by her bed. He is Rodmaf who tells her she is the daughter of Thorodd, a dying Viking chieftain who wants to see her before he dies. Under threat of having her friends killed, she agrees to accompany him back to his homeland. At the Viking village of Brodsted Kendra meets Hendrix, Thorodd"s wife and the old man who is her father. She learns that her mother died giving birth to her and that Rodmaf is her half-brother. Thorodd dies and a terrified Hendrix tells her that they must leave otherwise they will be sacrificed at Thorodd"s funeral. They escape in a small longship but the journey back is wrought with danger. In stormy conditions, they arrive at Bramingham and are rescued before their longship is crashes into the northern cliffs. Rodmaf"s fleet arrives and attacks the king"s army who are still maintaining the siege from the southern beach. The King"s army are no match for the battle hardened Vikings and are defeated. The siege is over, the Vikings leave and they approach winter with enough supplies to see them through. But what will happen, come spring with a massive Viking invasion fleet expected?

Karla Spicer is a senior teacher in Wellington, New Zealand"s capital who is hindered by the associate principal who resents her progressive ideas. However, through a conscientious attitude and by supporting junior staff and parents Karla is a popular staff member. New partner Ryan Purdon, the school"s property manager tells her about problems with a lackadaisical principal at Top Plateau who is forced to leave the tiny school near his family farm where he grew up. Karla agrees to take the acting principal"s position there and Ryan goes with her to stay in his farmhouse. Life in a remote area is different than expected with problems at the school and also on Ryan"s family farm where he has problems with his sister, step-father and mother who are all trying to sell the property divided between them by his late father"s estate.Tensions arise in the district with a marijuana plantation discovered near the farm and a local bikie gang being suspected as the growers. However, nothing is as it first seems, potential enemies become friends and the trusted, untrustworthy. Back in Wellington, teacher Chrissy Ancell is attacked and turns to Karla for help. As Chrissy"s attacker is a respected person, their efforts to get justice seem to be thwarted. It appears that the problems are intertwined with Karla being the kingpin and more than just a teacher striving to do the best for the children under her care.

School principal, Stacey Hayes follows the advice of private detective Doug McCann and flies from her home city of Wellington to Auckland airport on an early morning flight. Remaining unseen, she watches her husband"s arrival on a later flight and receives an unpleasant surprise. Her husband is greeted passionately by a pregnant woman. Jessica is the other Mrs Hayes. It was Jessica"s mother Chelsea who hired Doug to investigate her son-in-law. He discovers that Brendon Hayes is a bigamist with two homes and wives living in the two New Zealand cities, 650 kilometres apart. Until now Brendon Hayes has managed to keep his two lives and wives secret from each other. However, when the pair meet they, somewhat surprisingly, become friends as they, with Doug"s help, delve into Brendon"s past. They find the egotistical and manipulative man"s whole life is based on deceit and fraud with his accountancy company Hayes and Hayes the centre of his activities. Stacey and Jessica cope with the unpleasant truths about their husband in different ways. Stacey recalls doubts about him over the years and decides to move on in her life while Jessica finds it more difficult to manage. When Jessica"s baby is born, Brendon who does not know his bigamy has been exposed, decides to walk away from both marriages and marry his latest mistress, a young Filipino girl, Reyna Aquin. Doug"s investigations discover this and he asks an acquaintance in the police force to intervene and stop another sham marriage from happening. This proves to be Brendon"s downfall. It is not Stacey or Jessica who plan this but more ruthless enemies gather to revenge his exposed past life. He is attacked with dire consequences that affects everyone. How does his dishonesty and possibly criminal behaviour led to Stacey and Jessica being placed in a dangerous situation? Can the two Mrs Hayes finally meld their lives and families to move forward and face their future? All will be revealed in Ross Richdale"s sixth recent contemporay novel set in his homeland of New Zealand

In this third novel about Karla Spicer and her teaching career, we find her in charge of a thousand student Joseph Ward Junior High School in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city. After arriving at her new school Karla finds that Deputy Principal Michael White has been selecting more sporty pupils for his own syndicate. Karla stops this but believes the competition between the four school syndicates is at the expense of co-operation. It is as if there are four mini-schools all going their own way. Her hands on approach in melding the school into one identity is a distinct contrast from the previous principal who was more interested in being socially accepted in the business community. Avery Francis, a first year teacher is attacked and stabbed by an intruder late one afternoon but it is not a random attack for she knows her attacker, a prisoner escapee from her family’s past. There are repercussions that affect Karla later in the year. Year 10 student Gwen Young, reports to Karla that she is scared for her friend Jasmine who is skipping school to meet a boy she only met on the internet, at Auckland International Airport. Karla with police help steps in and stops an abduction by a middle-aged paedophile. With Ryan she traces the incident to a whole paedophile ring on the internet. Ryan is contracted by the police to help trace students’ pages in aPetal Life social site that is popular with teenagers. Other girls have been attacked and Savannah an undercover detective with Ryan’s help sets up a webpage and pretends to be a fourteen-year-old junior high girl. A similar meeting with a fake high school boy similar to Jasmine’s encounter is all set up but are the safeguards sufficient to stop a tragedy? With an expanding roll and the popularity of JWJHS, a conflict with Westview Intermediate School to the south over the boundary between the schools’ zones escalates. Problems with the principal there, Peter Niles surface and is the reason for parents wanting to enrol at Karla’s school. The Ministry of Education steps after the Westview Board of Trustees resigns and a government commissionaire is appointed to run the school. Karla is also asked to help out as an Executive principal, a position she held before arriving at JWJHS. When the zoning issues are solved, Karla’s school needs extra classrooms to cope in the following year but how can they be built in time? Jon, their Board of Trustees chairperson, suggests they buy a modular block direct from China. Is this feasible? Throughout her first year Karla moulds her school into one to be proud of but there are always problems with personalities and actions of staff and students. There is also another personal situation for early in the year she becomes pregnant with her family’s second child. Can Karla cope with the huge responsibility of running a large school and that of becoming a mother again?

In the last days of an interspecies war, Captain Tara Fye is given control of Yolk 3 a secret spaceship hidden on an asteroid orbiting Earth. She ordered to activate the Earth"s final defence system against the enemy of hexapods, six limb insect species and their allies, electronic entities. The planet is sealed both physically and electronically from the enemy by an artificial bubble. No spaceships can land or leave Earth. As well, no audio or visual transmissions can penetrate the bubble from either direction. Yolk 3 is designed to maintain human life until another world is found to save humans from extinction as an intelligent life force or, if possible to return in the future to reunite with those sealed on the planet. She is ordered to make this journey. Tara finds several somewhat sinister facts about her superiors, including having a computer implant installed unknowingly in her mind and that the outer pods encircling Yolk 3 contain hundreds of humans in deep frozen hibernation. They include, not only scientists, engineers and medical doctors but also many young women who have been impregnated without their knowledge in the hope that future generations would survive, even if humans on Earth become extinct. Tara and her crew are alone but the enemy still lurks out there ready to annihilate them. Someone or something is communicating with the enemy from Yolk 3 and they are being followed. Where is the pre-programmed course taking them and who are the extraterrestrial humans they rescue? Why is an ancient space station important and how can the space-time continuum that causes hundred of years to pass in real time because of their speed, affect the final outcome of their solar search?

When the remote settlement of East Ridge in the South Island of New Zealand is isolated during a snowstorm, Renee and Tyler take in three travellers. Without electricity or mobile phone contact and with all the roads around closed, the five are completely cut off from the world. There, they begin to bond and help one another with problems in their lives. Renee is now living with her partner Tyler at East Ridge after a violent marriage to a Larry Brooks and the loss of an unborn child. Tyler, who has a tractor to patrol the local section of highway, rescues Aza and Sofia after their car slides off the road in a heavy snowstorm. As well, Ian, a lawyer who was actually coming to visit Renee is also found in a separate accident where his motorbike skidded off the road. Aza is a lecturer and researcher at Auckland University who has had her work on genetic profiling, plagiarised from her PhD thesis by Professor Joseph Hardy who becomes an enemy when she can prove his crime. Ian is a lawyer who works for the Crown Prosecutors Office in Auckland. He tells Renee that her ex-husband is being investigated for murder of his child and attempted murder of a partner after a car crash. However, there is not enough concrete evidence to prove that it was not an accident and circumstantial evidence is needed to show Larry Brooks violent past. Several of the man"s previous partners are too scared to testify. Ian came down to the South Island to try to persuade Renee to be a witness at a trial that may eventuate. During their isolation at East Ridge, the five find they are being stalked and later attacked by an armed criminal, obviously employed by someone to assassinate one of them. But who is being targeted? Is it Aza who is a threat to the professor at the university, Renee by the violent Brooks or Ian, the lawyer out to build up a case against him? And how does being isolated from the world by the snowstorm add to the problems? Romance enters the equation in an unexpected way after Sofia is shot and wounded in the assassination attempt. Was she the target of the mysterious assassin or was it a mistaken identity with Renee or Aza being the intended target? All will be revealed in this romantic thriller set in one of the most beautiful places in the world.

Karla Spicer is called in as a Change Principal at Tuckett Area School in a remote New Zealand district. This small school takes pupils from Year I to 13 but has a falling roll, an apathetic principal, Don Trow and a divided board of trustees. The Ministry of Education is considering closing the high school section and downgrading the school to take just primary pupils (Year 1 - 8) pupils. Karla and her husband Ryan move south and begin to cure the school's problems. Ryan is a computer programmer who finds that the school is heavily in debt because Don Trow is faking online accounts and is betting on a Russian casino. He has run up huge debts and they want their money. By running down the PTA account he has paid off most of these debts but the casino is run by an international terrorist organisation named Haqq Nar. When Karla tells Trow she has knowledge of his illegal activities, he agrees to cooperate. Programmes are changed, slack teachers made to improve and the pupils become one co-operative unit. Ryan also takes on a part time position as school bus driver with his tiny bus travelling through the remote hinterland north of the school. Karla is also asked by the Ministry of Education to help at two other small schools in the area with teacher or board of trustees problems. Karla is curious when two businessmen arrive in town by helicopter and head for Trow's office. She intervenes just as Trow is about to be shot but is herself wounded. The would-be assassins escape but do not abandon their bid to make an example of Tuckett Area School. Ryan is near the end of his school bus route when his bus is hijacked. Five children and himself are flown by helicopter to a remote mountain hut but the kidnappers have no intention of letting them survive. They are just pawns in a sinister plot to get a Haqq Nar cell established in New Zealand. Can Karla cope when she realises that not only the police but the secret service and military are involved in rescue attempts?

Karla Spicer finds her position as Senior Teacher at Tui Park Primary School in Wellington, New Zealand's capital, is hindered by Associate Principal Val Cook, who resents her progressive ideas. Principal Murray Norwood, is an easy-going man drifting towards retirement who avoids controversy whenever possible. However, through a conscientious attitude and by supporting junior staff and parents Karla becomes a popular staff member. Karla becomes romantically involved with Ryan Purdon, the school's property manager and when he tells her about problems back at Top Plateau, a tiny school near his family farm where he grew up. After being approached by the Ministry of Education, Karla agrees to take the acting principal's position there and Ryan goes with her to stay in his farmhouse. Life in a remote area is different than expected with problems at the school and also on Ryan's family farm where he has problems with his sister, step-father and mother who are all trying to sell the property divided between them by his late father's estate. Tensions arise in the district with a marijuana plantation discovered near the farm and a local motorbike gang being suspected as the growers. However, nothing is as it first seems, potential enemies become friends and the trusted, untrustworthy. Back at Tui Park, teacher Chrissy Ancell is attacked and turns to Karla for help. As Chrissy's attacker is a respected person, their efforts to get justice seem to be thwarted. It appears that the problems are intertwined with Karla being the kingpin and more than just a teacher striving to do the best for the children under her care. N.B. The tui (pronounced two-ee) is a native New Zealand bird found in the local bush that covers many of the steep hills around Wellington in the North Island of New Zealand.

Travis Crichton and Jacey Roden's weekend orienteering contest in a vintage Jaguar car becomes a journey through a belt of fog and into a strange village called The Valley that is not shown on any map. The people there appear to be living in the 1950s. Jacey realises that this is more than random misfortune and that they are caught up in something more sinister. Back home through the fog, the authorities are interested in the Jaguar and it is no coincidence that an elderly Susan, a retired professor called Kevin and a second vintage Jaguar are involved. A ruthless enemy attacks one car and their only escape is to return to The Valley in the other car where their adventures begin. Seen mainly through Travis's eyes, Jacey and the others try to find the truth but become more involved in the time space continuum. Life identities from the future are involved, as is an organisation called Sago comprising of solids, androids, gaseous and organic intelligent species. Sago is using her family to prove or otherwise that humans are an inferior life species who revert to barbarism when under pressure. This test is but one to show that androids have superseded humans as the superior solid life identity. In this task, the Roden family are but the pieces in an intergalactic chess game with the umpires seemingly neutral but in reality either for or against the human family becoming unified. How can one play by the rules when the umpires are biased? Worse still; Jacey and Travis do not even know why it is happening, who is helping and who is hindering their efforts to find out the truth. After all access back home is broken, a journey through strange realms with links with other humans from both the past and their future, hold the key. Are the vintage Jaguar cars the catalyst to this random journey through the cosmos or is it Jacey herself? Only by embracing the fog will they discover more about their lives, both in the past, present and future.

When Greg awakes in decommissioned Russian nuclear submarine K264's decompression chamber, he finds himself alone. All the crew are just piles of ash. Also, the computer produces a hologram of a young woman called Nedda. More sinister is that the air on the surface has become poisoned, there is no contact with anyone and it seems that he is alone in the world . Shontel is stranded in a deep cave on Vancouver Island. On finding her way out she discovers that everyone is dead and encircling thunderclouds never go away. Contact is made and she is rescued by Greg, just before the clouds disperse and acid air surrounds her. Nedda admits that she is more than just a computer hologram but an advanced life-form who can metamorphose into human form from her natural amoeba state. She arrived on the submarine to help Greg but was followed aboard by another of her species, a terrorist who attacks her. Greg and Shontel save herand they travel through the ocean trying to find other humans and surface air that is not poisonous. They surface in the eye of a hurricane-type storm where the air is breathable and find a computer controlled tower but nothing alive. An elevator is discovered and they travel down to a vast underground cave of stalagmites. Here, they are met by a pony and small dog who leads them to a wounded human named Lilad. He comes from an underground village of Cavair. A breakaway group, The Moss had attempted to kill him. Lilad tells them that is the youngest person in Cavair for no women have given birth for a generation. The Moss find their way to the surface and attempt to destroy the base but they escape in K264. There are similar islands with access to Lilad's world. One has modern facilities that are not available in pre-industrial Cavair. Why is this so? There are two main buildings but one has been destroyed. Under it, they find an undamaged basement that contains a master computer that provides the fresh water and air to Cavair. However, the desalinised plant that feds in fresh water also has a sinister additive, a birth control chemical, hence the reason for no births for a generation that they disconnect. On their way to Cavair they encounter a curtain of complete darkness where all light is neutralised. Apart from not being able to see, their progress through is not hindered. On the far side they find themselves looking through a line of a hundred or more humans, including parents and children who are surrounded by a group of hostile men. How is it that they arrive in exactly the right place and time to rescue these humans who are from Lilad's village? After rescuing the group, they are told that it is two years, not just weeks since Lilad disappeared. They had moved ahead in time! With the birth controlled water turned off, nearly all the women of child bearing years in the village are now pregnant or have children.There is only one person who can get them back to twenty-first century Earth but who is it?

In 1530 AD, Meztli and Cualli are saved from an Inca sacrificial site where virgins are left to die to appease their gods because conquistadors invaded their lands. Zolin, Meztli's childhood friend has been sent by Hermit Tupac to rescue them, which he does. They must now follow a perilous journey along Inca trails through the mountains and the safety of free Inca towns. Etalpalli, one of the priests who brought the virgins to the sacrificial site attempts to find the pair. Conquistador Capitán Buena Giraldo teams up with Etalpalli who lies about his knowledge of a local gold mine is. Meztli and her friends are met by Urco from Cualli's village. He has been sent by Tupac to tell them that there is no safe haven through the mountains. Instead they must use to a secret cave that goes under the mountains to a hidden valley and golden pyramid. A far greater threat catches up with them. It is smallpox, a plague brought by the conquistadors that is devastating the local population. Only a few adults survive. For some unknown reason the conquistadors are immune and Inca children also have a high survival rate. After travelling through the cave, Meztli and her friends arrive in the secret valley of Ehuraythak and golden pyramid to find that the entire population of adults have died from the plague and only children have survived. These are led by two twelve-year-olds, Palia and Ekko who soon welcome the four adults and the tiny community becomes self-sufficient. Meanwhile, Tupac learns that a new order of fanatical priests have arrived to replace the original ones in the local temple who died with the plague. Their solution is to sacrifice all the children and the few remaining mothers at the next full moon. Tupac is too old to be able to stop this latest sacrifice himself so sets out to find Zolin and the maidens to ask them to return to the sacrificial site and rescue the latest victims. On the way he is attacked by rogue priests including Etalpalli. His llama is killed and he is shot by a musket that the conquistadors have brought to their land but manages to fight them off by using his slingshot. His one thought now is to get to the pyramid but with a musket ball in his shoulder he is weak and knows that if the ball is not removed he will die. Back at Ehuraythak, Palia and Ekko find Tupac. Though weak he survives and tells the four that they must return to the sacrificial site to rescue the mothers and children before the next full moon due to rise in only two weeks. Meztli and her friends begin a new journey back in a race against time through hostile territory controlled by the conquistadors and rogue priests. Their success depends on the help of others and sometimes the enemy become almost friends. The cost though, is gold and a lost gold mine that Capitán Giraldo believes is still in the area.