Tasker Tusker Tasker

John Tasker is a divided, but enjoined, man. Physically he is running from the law while hunting down his own father, just as his father used to track down the wild tuskers in Sri Lanka. At the same time, mentally, he is tracking down his murderous brother’s enemies, imaginably or not, with a deadly efficiency.

Adding to his confusion is how his indolent lawyer’s job in the Attorney-General’s Department has itself suddenly become fraught with danger for his own personal safety. The resultant clash that erupts between his fervently-adopted Australia and his fervently-rejected Sri Lanka isn’t helping the mental chaos he is thrown into on an otherwise perfectly-acceptable day.

One trouble is his state of being so enjoined. Through his own mind’s-eye he sees how his own milieu has been drawing him inevitably towards the cliff’s edge. Also through his-and-his-brother’s mind’s-eye he sees too much of the terrorizing worldwide Tamil organizations, and from a close-up much too gory. And through his-and-his-father’s mind’s-eye he sees no good nurture purpose to his existence, except the sighing and dying and the leavings from him.

He can see how it’s all so willfully like his father’s wild snared tuskers endeavouring to escape, trying to drag the lines dragging the antler’d sambhur’s skulls through the hopelessly impossible bush.

On top of all this, he has the living scaffold of the Sri Lankan Inspector Ekanayake now-and-ever looming over him. The Inspector doesn’t care a hoot about any mind’s-eye or mind’s-eyes, ‘bloody ****ing hell sorry’. He only cares for the hunt’s conclusion, and how John Tasker should know it.

What is the Inspector doing in Canberra and asking so many pointed questions? What might he know about the shadowy and murderous Tasker twin brother with, apparently, the justified alias of Tusker? All John Tasker can now see is how his world and the manic world of his fearsome brother are being forced to converge so suddenly and so bizarrely.

This is the first title in the ongoing Inspector Ekanayake series.