Billy Lime's Sydney

Kimmi has been working with Billy for five years. She walked into LimeGreen Music as a nervous graduate from the University of Sydney and quickly caught Billy’s eye. Kimmi isn’t just sexy and sassy, she’s so smart you could cut your finger on her. She schlepps ungrateful musicians around Australia, cajoling those who are drunk, high or both to get on stage, and then cleans up their mess once they’re on a plane home. Kimmi loves every moment. A tomboy, and a Karate 2nd Dan, Kimmi never thinks there is anyone she cannot handle. Except Billy. She knows he’s her match and more, which is why she loves him. She dare not say it for fear of rejection, losing her dream job and losing him.

FBI Special Agent Gabriela Martinez is stationed in Canberra when she is pulled into Billy Lime’s life. Gabriela asked to be seconded to Australia to get over the murder of her husband, a fellow FBI agent who was shot dead in their driveway by mafia being investigated for wire fraud and tax evasion. She’s the daughter of Mexican parents who crossed the border illegally when she was two and built a life for their only child. She is academically bright and, through the hard work of her parents and won a scholarship to study at Yale. She joined the LAPD before being approached by the FBI. The moment she and Billy meet, a spark of romance ignites.

Talented, charismatic and obnoxiously conceited in equal measures, Jet Kelly is the lead singer of The Pagan Virtue. 

He’s everyone’s idea of a hard-drinking, drug-taking lead singer. After 25 years of all that, he’s had enough. Other members of the band have other ideas and want a world tour to celebrate 25 years together. 

Jet wants none of it but is worn down by the others, who all need the cash after wasting fortunes on drugs, cars, and ex-wives who took them for everything. 

By the time the Pagans get to Sydney, Jet Kelly ready to kill. And someone is ready to kill him.  

Founder of The Pagans of Virtue, Rick Stewart is constantly battling to hold his band together. Stewart pulled the Pagans together in the ’90s, creating a power-rock sound in Los Angeles that matched anything happening in Seattle at the time. Stewart and Kelly collaborated on their earliest and biggest albums, but Kelly now refuses to write with him and the Pagans’ popularity is appears to be sliding quickly. Since Billy Lime left as their manager, Stewart has been locked in a continual war with Jet Kelly for control of the band’s direction. More than once, he’s threatened to kill Jet. Everyone says that one day, maybe, he’ll do it.  

Frankie Smythe is the enforcer and leader of the Australian arm of bikie gang, the White Sharks. Doing a 10-year stretch for murder, Smythe is nearing the end of his sentence and he’s ready to do business again. Drug business. At the centre of his scheming is Billy Lime, the publicity-seeking music promoter who seems to bring every American rock band into Australia. And with the musos comes a shitload of band and staging equipment – the perfect cover for the White Sharks’ new operation.

Being a big city lawyer is more sport than profession to David Carmody. Smooth, sophisticated and stinking rich, he is infamous for one-liners in front of judges, his silk ties and headline-dripping summations. Winning in court is not sufficient for his ego. He intimidates and then humiliates. His favourite client is Billy Lime, a never-ending source of revenue and amusement. Billy first hired him to analyse contracts with fast-talking American management companies and wide-boy Brits in pin-stripes. Carmody took them all on and earned Lime a fortune. English-born, Carmody lives the idyllic lifestyle of trophy wife, penthouse overlooking Bondi Beach and a coterie of Italian vintage sports cars.

An old school cop, pure and simple. Jim Scard has spent his career catching killers, drug dealers, bikers, deviants of varying perversions and a thousand petty crims living on the fringe of society and beyond the edge of the law. Four decades of pulling collars have made him hard-edged and cynical. He’s six months from retirement, and is confronted with his biggest case. He is going to solve it whatever it takes. And he has one last score to settle before he goes, too.

Hot-shot cop straight out of police college, Ryan Cameron has a reputation as the most ambitious officer in NSW Police – and he’ll stop at nothing to get the next promotion. Most of his colleagues think he’s an asshole – not because of his blunt sometimes arrogant manner, or his brutally efficient investigation skills, but because he was engaged to Jim Scard’s youngest daughter and failed to show on the big day. Cameron feared Scard’s immediate retribution but nothing has happened . . . yet.

Voluptuous, sassy entertainment reporter nicknamed Me-Me because she writes about herself in every story she files for The Sentinel. 

She thinks it’s because the first two letters of her first and second names spell out Me-Me, but then she’s not very self-aware. 

She’s an old Billy squeeze who still shimmies into tight skirts and even tighter situations. Billy hands her the biggest scoop of her career only for her to find herself at the wrong end of a gun.