The Inheritance by Gabriel Bergmoser

Publisher's Synopsis

A young woman is hiding out in a sleepy North Queensland tourist town, trying to stay under the radar, when she stumbles across a dangerous drug cartel. Anyone else might back away shaking their head, pretend they hadn't seen anything, keep quiet, even though people are getting hurt. But Maggie is no ordinary girl. She's got skills, as well as plenty of secrets to keep, burdens to carry - and anger to burn.

When circumstances mean that she has to get out of town - fast - she heads towards Melbourne, where she just might find the answers that she needs - answers about her family and who she really is. With a bent cop for a dubious ally, the police tracking her and furious bikers on her trail, Maggie is in deep trouble. She's only got her ingenuity and wits on her side - and a determination not to inherit the sins of her father.

My Review 

“The walk down the stairs could have lasted years. With each step, his shattered form came closer and clearer, even in the dark. It was only when she reached the bottom that she realised he was still breathing, feeble and uneven. His flickering eyes found her.

As she passed he managed a word.

‘Maggie.’”

And so Maggie makes her escape.

First, a word of warning to those who don’t appreciate violence, blood and gore. The Inheritance lives and breathes this type of stuff, so if you’re easily offended, you’re not going to enjoy the book. For the rest of us, bring it on!

The Inheritance reintroduces the reader to Maggie, the woman at the centre of the full-on mayhem in The Hunted. She proved herself to be a more than capable woman who, unfortunately, had killers on her back. But in all that, we didn’t really know much about her. Now we get to know her and her backstory much, much better.

In A Nutshell...

After Maggie’s father’s death, it becomes apparent the homicide detective had made a copy of evidence he had collected while working a serial killer case. It had been copied onto a USB stick and then hidden somewhere. The somewhere is not known but is keenly being sought.

As the sole heir, Maggie can get access to her father’s possessions including, presumably, the all-important USB.

The police want the stick…but so do some pretty bad dudes, too.

The upshot is that Maggie finds herself running from the police, a bikie gang and even a drug cartel.

Not only that, it becomes apparent the friends she thought she had aren’t quite as trustworthy as first imagined.

Fortunately, she’s more than capable of matching violence with more violence. She has a talent for ingenuity in the face of extreme adversity.

Let the mayhem ensue.

When we pick up Maggie’s story, she is working in a bar in the tourist town of Port Douglas in Far North Queensland. After a standover merchant breaks her boss’ nose for failing to repay a loan we get a sense of what she’s capable of when she wreaks some extreme revenge on him. Her actions indicate someone prone to great violence as well as more than a little ingenuity.

The fallout from her avenging angel act brings Harrison Cooper, a police ex-colleague of her father’s into the picture.

It turns out the man she attacked is a member of a cartel, her actions had been caught on CC and it was likely there was going to be some fallout for it.

But Cooper is more interested in the evidence on the USB and convinces Maggie that getting out of Port Douglas and driving back to Melbourne to pick up the hard drive is the best course of action.

Essentially, she heads back into the teeth of the danger she had fled when she left Melbourne years before.

The Inheritance is a type of treasure hunt (the USB stick) punctuated by close call encounters with bad guys (bikies, drug cartel members) prompting extremely violent altercations.

As Maggie gets herself into and out of each phase of the chase her body begins to take a battering, the stakes become raised and the situation appears increasingly impossible.

If you treat the story as an all-out action romp without questioning Maggie’s mental state too much and her almost superhuman evasive abilities then you’re going to enjoy the ride.