In 1992, toddler Yasmin Munoz went missing from a rainforest picnic spot near Cairns. No trace of her has ever been found.
Yet in 2012 Andrew Todd, a wealthy businessman and former mayor of Cairns, dies, and leaves in his will directions for a search for the missing child, who if she is still alive must now be a young woman. Cairns detective Cass Diamond is soon asked to help with the search. But Cass sometimes exceeds professional boundaries…
She discovers that in 1990, popular university student Chloe Campion had also gone missing, from a party in Brisbane celebrating her engagement to the son of Andrew Todd. Police inquiries at the time of the child’s disappearance found no link with the Campion case. But Cass is curious…
On her own, Cass delves deeper, and is led to a farm on the Atherton Tableland outside Cairns, where her curiosity gets her kidnapped with two other women, and into a hostage drama with an unpredictable assailant…
Praise for Missing Pieces -
“One of the pleasures of this novel is that de Costa is unafraid to spend time with the characters and the landscape, and Double Madness benefits from this soaking in. While never brutal or bloodthirsty, it nonetheless feels heavy with danger. ****” – Fiona Hardy, bookseller and committee member, the Australian Crime Writers Association
About The Author
De Costa was born in Sydney, Australia, where she began studying medicine in 1963 at the University of Sydney, before dropping out to travel after one year. She re-commenced her undergraduate medical studies in Dublin, at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, in 1967. In 1973 she moved to Papua New Guinea to complete a residency in Port Moresby General Hospital, after which she returned to Ireland to undertake specialist training in obstetrics and gynaecology.
In 1994, she moved to Cairns where she continued her clinical practice until 2013. From 1994 and 2009 de Costa was part of the outreach specialist obstetric and gynaecological service established by Professor Michael Humphrey through Cairns Base Hospital, providing services throughout Far North Queensland.
De Costa is the author of around 90 research articles,and a number of textbooks. Her principal areas of research have been in reduction of foetal alcohol syndrome in children of indigenous women, vitamin D levels requirements of pregnant women in Far North Queensland, as well as birth by caesarean section. She completed a PhD at the University of Sydney under the supervision of Dr Hans Pol researching the history of caesarean section births. Her thesis became the subject of a book, Hail Caesar: Why one in three Australian babies are born by Caesarean sections, published in 2008.
