A country town, a brutal murder, a shameful past, a reckoning to come…
The injustices of the past and dangers of the present envelop Aboriginal policewoman Renee Taylor, when her unwilling return to the small outback town of her childhood plunges her into the investigation of a brutal murder.
Renee Taylor is planning to stay the minimum amount of time in her remote hometown – only as long as her mum needs her, then she is fleeing back to her real life in Brisbane.
Seconded to the town’s sleepy police station, Renee is pretty sure work will hold nothing more exciting than delivering speeding tickets. Then a murdered woman is found down by the creek on the outskirts of town.
Leading the investigation, Renee uncovers a perplexing connection to the disappearance of two young women thirty years earlier. As she delves deeper and the mystery unfurls, intergenerational cruelties, endemic racism, and deep corruption show themselves, even as dark and bitter truths about the town and its inhabitants’ past rise up and threaten to overwhelm the present…
Authentic, gripping crime drama from a bright new voice in fiction.
Light was breaking on the horizon as she ran along a dirt driveway, trying not to trip or stumble in the potholes. She reached the wire gate panting and paused to look in both directions. She could see an endless straight bitumen road with fields of wheat on either side, canopied by a vast universe of distant stars. It wouldn’t take him long to notice she had escaped, to find her again in this dry, flat landscape.
Hurry up. Choose.
She chose the west and ran away from the rising sun, hoping to stay hidden in the twilight shadows. Her feet were soft and bare but adrenaline prevented her from feeling any pain from the rough stones. She heard the sound of a familiar car engine starting and pushed to run faster.
Headlights came from behind and she threw herself into the tall grass on the side of the road. As she expected, it was him. She watched the car drive by. The window was down, his elbow resting on the door, and she could see his eyes scanning the fields for movement. Cold, hard eyes. She crouched as low as possible, heart pounding, waiting and praying for the car to pass.
When the headlights had faded into nothing, she crept back out onto the road. She looked again in each direction, knowing she couldn’t return to where she had run from, nor go in the direction the car had taken. Enormous paddocks of long grass lay on either side, gently swaying in the early morning breeze, but to one side she could just make out the silhouette of trees on the horizon. At least it would give her a place to rest for a moment, think of the next move. She made up her mind and bolted towards the foliage.
The grass whipped against her legs as she fled across the paddock, and eventually she tumbled down a steep dirt bank, landing hard in mud. She found her footing, wiping the sweat off her forehead, and looked around with all the fear and exhaustion of day-long hunted prey. She could just make out dirt slopes on either side dipping down sharply into water.
A log that had fallen across the mud stretched into the creek. She crawled along it, careful not to slip into the stream, and leaned down to cup some water into her parched mouth. Hesitant at first, careful not to make a sound, then gulping more hastily. Something plopped into the creek nearby breaking her focus on drinking, making her gasp and jump. A turtle or a fish perhaps. She was paralysed by fear.
Retreating back from the log, she dragged herself up to her feet and continued along the creek bed, climbing over fallen timber and squelching through deep sludge to get away. To where, she did not know. Just away. As far away as she could possibly get from the hell that lurked behind. She ran as far as she could along the muddy creek bank until she collapsed exhausted in a small clearing. Her chest rose and fell, sucking in the cool morning air which felt sharp in her lungs, as adrenaline pounded through her veins. She knew fear, and she knew dread, but this was nothing short of utter terror.
Two eagles circled high overhead as she lay outstretched on her back in a damp green clearing, too physically exhausted to move.
The sweet smell of melaleuca blossoms reminded her of the warm lemon and honey drink her mum made when she had a sore throat. Her throat hurt now. Everything hurt. She rubbed her forehead, squinted against the ever-brightening sunlight and rolled to one side to break the glare. The soles of her feet throbbed and her legs were red raw from the grass lashing them.
Someone was playing a piano. At first she thought she was hallucinating, but no, there was music on the breeze. It reminded her of the church her mum always watched on television. Someone was close by. She would allow herself a few more breaths to muster the energy needed to climb the hill that lay between her and the source of the music before making a dash to safety. Such a sweet melody had to indicate a haven.
The gentle sway of melaleucas filled her vision with their soft creamy petals blossoming cloud-like from trunks of gnarled-up layers of bark. Then the sound of a twig snapping jolted her upright. Her heart gave a sudden primal thump.
‘I knew I couldn’t trust you.’ A hoarse, deep voice came from behind. He loomed overhead. Cold eyes. ‘I wanted to trust you. You know, I tried so hard to trust you.’ She could see the mark on his neck from where she’d scratched him that morning. A thin red line oozed tiny bubbles of blood.
She moved her hands to shield her face. ‘Please don’t. I’ll be better this time. I promise.’
His eyes stared back at her. ‘I’ve already given you too many chances. You betrayed me.’
Before the scream could escape her mouth, the boulder came crashing down.
Chapter 1
Tuesday 8 February 2000
She loved the crisp morning air of the countryside. Running felt easy when the air was cool and dry. Morning jogs in the city with its dense humidity felt like running in a bulletproof vest but here in Goorungah Renee glided through the streets. The sun poked its way above the horizon and the streetlights flickered off. Her ankles felt good. Her left ankle was still healing from when she had been pushed over by some guy at a domestic. She wondered what kind of work lay ahead for her now she was back in the country.
She reached the most elevated point of her route, affording a view across the sprawling country township. It was so quiet. A few trucks had passed her, carrying supplies for further out west, but she still hadn’t seen another person. The country town slept.
Houses stretched across the plains. Slightly grander ones lay to the east, Snob’s Knob as the locals called it. But they weren’t really mansions. No one with any real money would stay in a place like Goorungah.
The more modest dwellings lay to the west; they were more likely to be public housing. And then a little bit of everything in between, including her mother’s house right down there, smack in the middle, just off Main Street. Despite the differences, it was the same as in the city, any city for that matter – rich sides and poor sides.
Her favourite part of the run was coming up. It was a long gentle slope back down into town. The thin layer of perspiration made the air feel cooler on her skin. She had been running for almost an hour. On her first day back, three days ago, she’d mapped out a path to do every morning during her rural secondment – a ten-kilometre route around the perimeter of town, enough to keep her fit for her return to Brisbane. She slowed to a walk, checking her watch. Fifty-five minutes.
She would need to pick up her pace to see results.
‘Careful of them snakes.’
Renee jumped and looked around, searching for the owner of the deep raspy voice.
‘I’ve seen three come past here in the last month.’ An old man was sitting alone in his garage surrounded by dust and tools and random bits of steel and rusty farm machinery.
‘What colour?’ Renee stopped outside the fence, hands on hips, still panting, sweat dripping from her forehead. He looked hard at her and she knew the answer. ‘Brown?’ The most venomous. That’s one of the few things she knew about her dad. His totem. His Lore deemed that the brown snake would protect anyone from that nation and never harm them. She liked to think that this protection extended to her, despite knowing so little about traditional ways.
The old man nodded. ‘It’s dry. They’re coming up for water. There was one right here sunnin itself yesterday.’ He picked up his walking stick and pointed to a bare patch of dirt in the front yard. ‘Right there.’
She looked around. The place looked dishevelled. He looked dishevelled with his messy thin grey hair and leathery sunburned forearms poking out of his rolled-up, crumpled flannelette shirt sleeves. ‘You take care of yourself, hey?’ She wondered if he lived alone. If a man like him was bitten by a brown snake with no one to call an ambulance, he’d die in a matter of minutes.
‘Don’t you worry about me, love. I shot the bastard. You be careful running on those back roads, especially in the dark. Never know what you might come up against.’
Renee nodded, feeling a strange vacuum in her stomach. She should be thankful for the warning, but his brutal watchfulness told her otherwise.
Her mother’s house was a simple worker’s cottage, located just around the corner from Main Street behind the Criterion Hotel, one of the old pubs. Goorungah was no exception to any other small town in regional Queensland in that it had one pub per five hundred people. So in Goorungah there were three pubs plus the RSL, which Renee had noticed was becoming increasingly popular among the elderly residents since its recent installation of centralised heating and cooling. And five new poker machines.
She eased the gate open, wincing as it screeched on its hinges in protest. Renee had hated her mother’s house when she was younger, with its large overgrown garden and loose timber panelling. The school kids would tease her that she lived in a creepy old ghost house. Her first day of primary school, after her mum had dropped her off, she’d stood in the playground looking around at the other kids waiting to see who would suggest the first game … They all played together but no one asked her to join in, not the girl who lived in the ghost house. But now she liked it. The place had character. The tall pines gave it shade and privacy, and the wooden floors kept the interior cool in the harsh outback summer.
Any luck her mother would still be asleep and stay asleep long enough for her to tend to a few outside chores before her second day of work at the station. She sat for a moment on the front steps, removing her shoes and socks, thinking about how much she wanted a drink but she couldn’t bring herself to go inside to the kitchen sink and risk waking her mother. She turned on the tap in the front yard and ran the water for a moment, letting all the dirt flush through, then cupped her hand beneath to form a pool of water. Those blissful gulps were the most enjoyable reward for running. She splashed water over her face and dampened her hair.
It was going to be a scorcher.
On Sale: 04/06/2025