The Hunter Valley 1847 The last thing Mellie Vale remembers before the fever takes her is running through the bush as a monster chases her - but no one believes her story. In a bid to curb Mellie’s overactive imagination, her benefactors send her to visit a family friend, Anthea Winstanley. Anthea is an amateur palaeontologist with a dream. She is convinced she will one day find proof the ichthyosaur and the plesiosaur swam in the vast inland sea that millions of years ago covered her property at Bow Wow Gorge.

1. When Penelope Jane Martindale arrives home from the battlefields of World War I to make peace with her father and commemorate the death of her two younger brothers in the trenches, her reception is not as she had hoped. Looking for distraction, she finds a connection between a fossil at London’s Natural History Museum and her brothers which leads her to Bow Wow Gorge. But the gorge has a sinister reputation. When PJ uncovers some unexpected remains, the past reaches into the present and she becomes determined to discover what really happened all that time ago …