When Lionel Hawker, the promising young amateur cricketer, is selected for the 1878 MCC tour of Australia, he thinks that the worst he will have to face are the devilish deliveries of Spofforth the Demon Bowler. He could not have foreseen being dragged by a beautiful and wilful woman into the nefarious plots of a gang of wild colonial bushrangers, in whose company he will have to face the troopers of the Victorian Mounted Constabulary in the Battle of the Deadlurk Stockade. Moreover Lionel has to experience the complications and disappointments of an ill-starred love affair, and is forced to confront the unpalatable truth of his family's murky past. This is the ninth volume in the Hawker Chronicles, telling the story of the Hawker family of Haplow Hall from the time of the Tudors to the present day.