Dust Off the Bones
-
- 8,49 €
Publisher Description
The Times Historical Book of the Month
''Vivid, page-turning [and] unlike anything else you'll read this year. Do not miss it' Gabriel Bergmoser, author of The Hunted
Even in the vast outback, the past can't stay buried forever
Death follows young Tommy McBride everywhere. Five years ago his family was murdered, and now a freak accident sends him fleeing into the wilderness of the Australian outback with a man lying dead in his wake. But Tommy is haunted by even worse - as children, he and his brother Billy witnessed the state-sanctioned massacre of the Indigenous Kurrong people by the ruthless Native Police Inspector Noone, and they haven't seen each other since.
When an official inquiry is launched into the massacre, the successful life that Billy has built for himself comes under threat. He sets off in search of his long lost brother, but isn't the only one on Tommy's trail―Inspector Noone is looking for him too, and will do anything to stop the truth from coming to light.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Howarth's sequel to Only Killers and Thieves is as searing and savage as the Australian frontier setting that both novels share. After a brief recap of the massacre of the aboriginal Kurrong tribe that ended the first novel—set in motion by 16-year-old Billy McBride and his reluctant 14-year-old brother, Tommy, seeking vengeance for the killing of their parents, which they believed was done by an aboriginal man—the story moves ahead five years to 1890. Billy has married the wealthy widow of a cattle rancher near his family's homestead in Queensland, and Tommy is on the run after accidentally killing his boss during a dispute at a sheep station in the southern territories. Their lives are again upended in 1897 when a witness to the Kurrong killings hires an attorney to investigate the massacre, thus incurring the wrath of Edmund Noone, the Native Police Inspector who perpetrated the slaughter and threatened both brothers were they to ever say anything. Noone is a thoroughly terrifying creation, a violent psychopath whose long shadow casts a chilling pall over the McBrides' and their loved ones. This masterly tale of trauma and retribution is more than worthy of the original.
