Hachette India

The Stoning

Peter Papathanasiou

"Outback noir has a new star" MARK SANDERSON The Times

"Deliciously dark" ALISON FLOOD Guardian

"Outback noir with the noir dialled right up. I loved it." CHRIS HAMMER

"Political crime fiction of the highest order" JOAN SMITH The Sunday Times

A small town in outback Australia wakes to an appalling crime.

A local schoolteacher is found taped to a tree and stoned to death. Suspicion instantly falls on the refugees at the new detention centre on Cobb's northern outskirts. Tensions are high between whites and the local indigenous community between immigrants and the townies.

Still mourning the recent death of his father Detective Sergeant George Manolis returns to his childhood hometown to investigate. Within minutes of his arrival it's clear that Cobb is not the same place he left. Once it thrived but now it's a poor and derelict dusthole with the local police chief it deserves. And as Manolis negotiates his new colleagues' antagonism and the simmering anger of a community destroyed by alcohol and drugs the ghosts of his past begin to flicker to life.

Vivid pacy and almost dangerously atmospheric The Stoning is the first in a new series of outback noir featuring DS Manolis himself an outsider and a good man in a world gone to hell.

Peter Papathanasiou

Peter Papathanasiou was born in northern Greece and adopted as a baby to an Australian family. His writing has been published internationally by The New York Times, Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Canberra Times, Daily Telegraph, The ABC, SBS, Huffington Post. He also holds an MA in Creative Writing from City University, London, and a PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the Australian National University. His first book, a memoir Son of Mine was published in 2019 by Salt.