Our customers are always looking for good quality reads by Australian authors, the most popular genre being crime.
Chris Hammer, Christian White, Jane Harper, Gary Disher and my own personal favourite, Michael Robotham, all fit nicely into this category and for the most part with these reads you actually experience Australia, the heat, the red dirt and the vastness of our country.
Debut author Patricia Wolf landed on our shelves in August.
The catchphrase that drags you in is: “Two missing backpackers. One vast outback.”
The book opens with a chilling prologue.
DS Lucas Walker is on leave in his hometown, Caloodie, looking after his dying grandmother.
When two young German backpackers vanish from the area on their way to a ranch, to complete their mandatory farm work to fulfill the terms of their visa, Lucas finds himself unofficially on the case.
But why all the interest from the Federal Police, when they have probably just ditched the heat and dust of the outback for the coast?
Something is not right.
As the number of days the couple is missing climbs, DS Walker is joined by the girl’s sister.
A detective herself from Berlin, she is desperate to find her sister before it’s too late.
Outback is an engrossing suspense-thriller set in far western Queensland with the shimmering heat haze and endless red dirt that marks that part of the world as a brutal place to visit.
It explores how the vast, stark and often environmentally inhospitable Australian outback is at once both foreboding and breathtakingly beautiful.
But it’s not only the natural features that make the Outback a dangerous place to live.
Its vastness means that going missing means a difficult search will follow.
Author Patricia Wolf has drawn on Australia’s notorious recent history of crimes targeting young international travellers in creating a tense dual-thread narrative with an evocative setting and engaging characters.
My only issue was that there were several times when I thought I’d already read a sentence or a scene, as if in the edit, a paragraph or a thought was supposed to be moved, but instead was accidentally copied and pasted.
I’m a huge fan of Australian noir so I couldn’t resist Outback and was delighted to see her second novel, Paradise, arrive only two months later.