Simon McDonald

Martin Scarsden is back—and someone wants him dead.

After an explosion rips through the boatshed in Port Silver set up for his latest book launch, and Scarsden’s family and friends are assailed by gunfire, the intrepid reporter is forced to abandon his home, and his entire life, while ASIO agent Jack Goffing investigates the assassination attempt. He ends up in the middle of nowhere; the sun-baked town of Port Paroo.

But trouble has a way of finding Scarsden; or vice versa, really. Because Port Paroo doesn’t offer the refuge he’d hoped it would. Heck, it might prove more dangerous than the armed hit squad still hunting him…

Chris Hammer is a crime writer in a class of his own—one of the national treasures of Australian crime fiction. His multi-narrative plot is intricate and carefully laid, and if you dismantled its many components, you might think them incongruous: a decades-old murder, a missing painting, the fate of two nineteenth-century explorers, the disgraced ex-wife of a legendary football player, fierce animosity between rival families. But these elements are all blended seamlessly, and the result is another unputdownable outback mystery-cum-thriller.

Hammer makes storytelling look so effortless and easy, which is a testament to his craftsmanship, because that’s the hardest thing in the world to pull off.