Part of Series
Ex-detective Frank Swann is now on the outside of the police force – the only way to get justice done in Perth. In 1979 the city is a place of celebration and corruption. There are street parties, official glad-handing – even a royal visit – to commemorate a century and a half since colonisation. But behind the festivities a new kind of land grab is going on, this time for mining leases. The price of gold is up and very few, it seems, are incorruptible before its lure. When Swann is hired to probe the suicide of a respected geologist, he's drawn into a mire of vice and fraud, at the centre of which sit the directors of a gold-lease consortium. They're an unlikely collection of the seemingly respectable and the clearly not, with one thing in common: a lust for wealth that verges on a disease. For an old-school tough guy like Swann, that's a gauntlet he just has to pick up . . .
Author
David Whish-Wilson is the author of nine novels and three creative non-fiction books. He was born in Newcastle, NSW but raised in Singapore, Victoria and WA. He left Australia aged eighteen to live for a decade in Europe, Africa and Asia, where he worked as a barman, actor, streetseller, petty criminal, labourer, exterminator, factory worker, gardener, clerk, travel agent, teacher and drug trial guinea pig. David’s first novel in the Frank Swann crime series, Line of Sight (Penguin Australia) was shortlisted for a Ned Kelly Award in 2012. He has since written three more in the series – the first three being published in Germany by Suhrkamp Verlag. David wrote the Perth book in the NewSouth Books city series, which was short-listed for a WA Premiers Book Award. David's first Lee Southern crime novel True West was shortlisted for a Ned Kelly Award for Best Fiction in 2020. David also teaches in the prison system in Perth and previously in Fiji, where he started the countries first prisoner writing program. He currently lives in Fremantle, Western Australia with his partner and three kids, where he teaches creative writing at Curtin University.
