Flight Risk. Leroy Cunningworth Murder Mysteries, #3

Flight RiskA Standalone Thriller that may be read separately from any other book in  the series At 30, 000 feet, there are no police. Just the rules you make up. Leroy Cunningworth's idea of a safe journey is the slow ferry to Phillip Island, where the greatest danger is an aggressive seagull. So when ASIO drafts him and former cop Jack Flint onto a red-eye flight to New York, he knows something has gone badly wrong.
Their assignment is deceptively simple: protect Elena Petrova, a defecting forensic accountant carrying a digital key capable of exposing the Nine Dragons-a shadow consortium laundering money and power for the world's most dangerous actors. The problem is that the aircraft is already compromised. Russian intelligence operatives with diplomatic cover sit in first class. Corporate enforcers for the Dragons watch from the aisles.
And a flight attendant with a dragon tattoo and unreadable loyalties knows far more than she should. When a sophisticated communications blackout isolates the plane over the Pacific, the masks come off. Trapped in a sealed tube of steel and sky, Leroy must rely on his barrister's logic and an art restorer's eye for forgeries to identify the killers hidden among the passengers - while Jack's instincts become their last line of defence.
But the true danger isn't the mid-air confrontation. It's what waits on the ground: a betrayal that turns a Canadian safe house into a kill box, and a revelation that marks Leroy and Jack for death by a network that never forgets - and never forgives. Flight Risk is a taut, intelligent international thriller that moves from claustrophobic airborne suspense to brutal ground-level reckoning, proving that the most dangerous journeys aren't measured in miles but in secrets - and the price of carrying them.