The Outback Murders — Howard Hoyt Hilton

The revelation of a world-altering invention stuns a conference of international scientists meeting in Australia's forbidding outback. As realization that the nation possessing it would command untold power and wealth in the world, the scientists plot against each other while scheming to take the invention from its creator. Mysterious happenings and deaths escalate as killings range from bludgeoning by boomerang to poisonings from an exotic Asian plant, from fire ignited by an obscure scientific formula to the use of a bizarre murder instrument which only one man could fathom. Action sweeps from the luxury of a posh desert resort to a remote ramshackle desert shack housing a secret laboratory. The mystery reaches its dramatic climax atop bleak, windswept Ayers Rock. Strange alliances, mystic Aboriginal rites, personal animosities, rampant suspicion and ingenious schemes add to the novel's suspense and its startling conclusion.