The Stoning - "The crime debut of the year" THE TIMES

"Outback noir has a new star" MARK SANDERSON, The Times

"Outback noir with the noir dialled right up. I loved it." CHRIS HAMMER

A small town in outback Australia wakes to an appalling crime.

A local schoolteacher is found taped to a tree and stoned to death. Suspicion instantly falls on the refugees at the new detention centre on Cobb's northern outskirts. Tensions are high, between whites and the local indigenous community, between immigrants and the townies.

Detective Sergeant George Manolis returns to his childhood hometown to investigate. Within minutes of his arrival, it's clear that Cobb is not the same place he left. Once it thrived, but now it's a poor and derelict dusthole, with the local police chief it deserves. As Manolis negotiates his new colleagues' antagonism, and the simmering anger of a community destroyed by alcohol and drugs, the ghosts of his past begin to flicker to life.

"Political crime fiction of the highest order" JOAN SMITH, The Sunday Times