Tyranny of Fortune - Don Hoult

Tyranny of Fortune completes Don Hoult’s trilogy of Eye of the Rainbow Serpent, and Cliffs of Ochre, where Chloe Boyce resists the relentless pursuit of  predators trying to take control of her vast cattle holdings and iron-ore deposits in the Kimberley and Pilbara wilderness of Western Australia.

Aided by her partner, Andrew Hanna, she builds on an inheritance, the result of the desperate criminal activities of her father. Hanna is a lawyer with a past that starts to catch up with him, a past he hides from Chloe. 

Neither of them is aware of the forces of revenge that threaten the very existence of their fortune – a fortune threatened by the touch of a computer keystroke.
    
Chloe attempts to isolate part of her iron-ore holdings from mining due to their natural beauty and  indelible evidence of millenniums of prior human occupation.  
    
A rogue South African prospector discovers a major copper/gold deposit on one of her cattle stations which she cannot ignore. He is an associate of  criminal bikie gangs who seek to muscle in on his discovery. Chloe is threatened with violence.

Her world falls apart when Hanna dies in a helicopter crash. Was it murder or it was it due to his own negligence? 

She is now on her own, but does she have the physical and mental strength to carry on and resist as a criminal element within the government moves to confiscate her iron-ore deposits – an action subsequently held valid by the Court. 

She has lost a fortune because of her mixed race heritage - she is part aboriginal and not entitled to the vast iron-ore deposits. Why?
    
But another force she was totally oblivious of emerges –  will it destroy her completely, or will someone from Hanna's past destroy the threat?