Slow Burn

An organization called The Cleaners is making threats, just days before the Australia Day holiday in Sydney. The year before, an Aboriginal protester was murdered. Lost in the emotional quicksand of a marital breakup, journalist Alex Tolman finds himself caught up in the events. Written with page-turning energy, but with a flair that allows the reader to linger and savor, this intricately plotted novel is a cross-weave of romantic discord, family dysfunction, class tension, and Indigenous politics. Slow Burn is a work of crackling literary fiction that lays aspects of the thriller over the bones of a ghost story. It is a gritty, contemporary political work based on race politics and framed within a crime and corruption genre novel.