Bone Lands

'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?

'A gripping read right to the end.' - Meredith Jaffe


'Bone Lands is incredibly evocative. You can taste the dust and feel the searing heat as Mounted Trooper Hawkins investigates the brutal murder of three settler children. Hawkins is a terrifically authentic character and this is high quality writing - sharp and descriptive - that doesn't flinch or look away.' - David Whish-Wilson

'Bone Lands is what you get if Breaker Morant comes home damaged and unmoored, takes a job policing the brutal grandfathers of the unhinged men of Wake in Fright, and collides with the ruthless corruption of money, power and pride. Propulsive, atmospheric and utterly compelling, Bone Lands keeps faith with both the history and its purpose, delivering a cracking yarn that drives to a shocking conclusion. With desperate characters trapped in the irons of a rigid social code, and tormented by unbounded colonial greed like the ruined landscape around them, it's The Unforgiven mixed with Blue Murder and Sunday Too Far Away, dipped in the Iliad, in the register of Blood Meridian.' - John Byron

Pip Fioretti lives in Sydney, and enjoys hiking, books, friends and family. Bone Lands is her first crime novel.

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