DUST OFF THE BONES

A tale of violence and redemption in the Australian Outback.

In this sequel to Only Killers and Thieves (2018), Howarth carries the story of brothers Billy and Tommy McBride forward following their involvement as teenagers in the unprovoked massacre of members of an Aboriginal tribe after the murders of their parents and sister. Billy has married and become a prosperous Queensland cattle rancher while the younger and more sensitive Tommy assumes a new identity and roams Australia’s vast open spaces on perilous cattle drives. Haunting both men are memories of their role in the mass slaughter, conducted at the direction of Edmund Noone, the brutal commander of the Native Police, an organization notorious in Australian history for carrying out genocidal attacks, euphemistically referred to as “dispersals,” against Indigenous peoples. Noone has successfully suppressed the evidence of his blood-soaked past while rising to respectability as Brisbane’s police commissioner. When ambitious young lawyer Henry Wells, threatened by the risk of disclosure of his own secret, embarks on a single-handed effort to prompt a full government inquest into the long-ago incident, the McBrides and Noone must weigh the risks of exposure against the demands of conscience. In settings that range from the harsh beauty of the Australian countryside, “a place that [couldn’t] be tamed,” to the tension of a packed small-town courtroom, their starkly differing responses provide the energy of the novel’s often violent but far from predictable second half. Fast-paced and brimming with colorful, realistic detail, it also paints a vivid portrait of colonial Australia in the midst of its transition to independence as the 20th century begins while posing disturbing questions about the country’s historic cruelty to its Native inhabitants.

A classic cowboy saga is transformed into a complex, sophisticated morality play.