Bone Lands
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF DANGER AWARD FOR CRIME FICTION
'Isn't it your job to stop people being murdered?'
1911, on a winter's night in arid New South Wales wool country, mounted trooper Augustus Hawkins discovers the bodies of three young people. They are scions of the richest family in the district, savagely murdered on a road that Hawkins should have been patrolling, had he not been busy bedding the local schoolteacher.
Detectives arrive from Sydney and the disgraced Hawkins, a traumatised veteran of the Boer War, comes under fierce scrutiny. With his honour and sanity at stake, he becomes hell-bent on finding the murderer. But as ever darker secrets are revealed about the people he thinks of as friends, Hawkins is forced to confront an uncomfortable question: who is paying the price for the new nation's prosperity?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Bone Lands follows the guilt and would-be redemption of Augustus Hawkins, the single police presence in a vast expanse of Australian wool farms circa 1911. When his absence from his post allows a high-profile triple murder to occur, the forlorn war veteran must not just reclaim his good name but find out the party behind the gruesome slaying. Debut author Pip Fioretti captures the desolation of both the time period and the wintry New South Wales landscape, while audiobook narrator Lewis Fitz-Gerald brings quiet gravity to the protagonist’s first-person narrative. Hawkins returns in the author’s 2025 novel Skull River, but readers should start here to really get to know this layered character. This is a slow-burn outback noir that very much pays off.
