Outback noir has a new star MARK SANDERSON The TimesDeliciously dark ALISON FLOOD
GuardianOutback noir with the noir dialled right up. I loved it. CHRIS HAMMERPolitical crime
fiction of the highest order JOAN SMITH The Sunday TimesA 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. Still mourning the recent death of his father 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. And 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. Vivid pacy and almost dangerously atmospheric
The Stoning is the first in a new series of outback noir featuring DS Manolis himself an
outsider and a good man in a world gone to hell.
