Cirrus@Austlit

'Of exotic mixed-race heritage, Chloe Quartpot lives an isolated life on the vast Venus Downs cattle station in the Kimberleys of Western Australia. One day on walkabout with her beloved indigenous grandfather, Johnny Quartpot she is shown a sacred site and he gives her a red stone – the eye of the rainbow serpent. Johnny swears her to secrecy as custodian of the site, but after his sudden disappearance and presumed death and the advances of the station owner’s sons, Carl and Walter Boyce, she decides to leave Venus Downs for Perth. She experiences racial prejudice, but her beauty leads her into modelling and soon catches the eye of a London agent, Paul LeClair. Known simply as “Chloe” she soon becomes and international supermodel. However, her life begins to spiral out of control as successive men seek to possess and control her, often with deadly consequences.

'From outback Western Australia to London, this is an exciting, fastpaced story about passion, murder and cruelty of human greed.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Chloe, the mixed-race illegitimate daughter of a cattle baron inherits vast landholdings in the Kimberley and Pilbara regions of Western Australia. The wealth has been accumulated by her father’s criminal actions brought on by the desperation to survive which saw him dragged into a conspiracy from which there was no escape. Chloe had been brought up on Venus Downs, unacknowledged by Henry Boyce, her natural father. On the death of her father and his adopted twin sons she is suddenly party to the ongoing crime. A young lawyer, Andrew Hanna, discovers the crime and the main perpetrators, but is his client a willing participant? He falls in love with her, but she is already married to a psychopathic husband, whom she fled from in London when she abandoned her international modelling career. The central conspirator to the crime moves to gain control of her entire estate, through financial manipulation, blackmail, murder and fear. Hanna gradually unravels the identity of the criminals involved at his own peril when he establishes Chloe is not involved, but can he recover her inheritance from a hopeless financial position? As with the first novel in the trilogy, “Cliffs of Ochre” follows “The Eye of the of the Rainbow Serpent,” as a reflection of the human condition of exploitation and greed.'  (Publication summary)