A white-knuckle ride into a nightmarish outback setting, where a man searching for mercy encounters a town baying for violent vengeance. A pulse-pounding literary thriller with a stunning final twist.

`Think three-fifths of the way to fuck-all-nowhere-ville. Pioneering grazing family. Once hallowed farming country gone to shit. Rabbit plagues and feral pigs. Never-ending drought. Full of Flat Earth Party-voting, climate-change-denying, God-bothering, gun-nut, ground-zero, wife-beating, racist, fundamentalist f*ckers. Pardon my French. Apart from that it’s just a great place.’

Welcome to The Leap, an outback town fuelled by fear, churning with corruption, prejudice and misogyny–and blighted by its inescapable history of frontier violence. Into this nightmarish morass falters traumatised British diplomat, Benedict Fotheringham-Gaskill. He’s on his first Australian mission, one seemingly straightforward enough–until he arrives in The Leap to battle a town conspiring against him.

The Leap is baying for violent vengeance over the alleged murder of the celebrated daughter of a powerful local grazier. But Benedict is on an impossible quest for the opposite: mercy for the young woman’s two alleged female killers. The townspeople will challenge and threaten Benedict at every turn as he fights for justice, his future, his sanity–and ultimately his life.

From the acclaimed author of Jesustown comes a pulse-pounding throat-punch of a literary thriller, filled with humour, horror, blistering historical truths, indelible characters and a final twist that will take your breath away.