The Stoning

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

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

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.

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. 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.

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


Genre: Mystery

"Outback noir with the noir dialled right up. I loved it." - Chris Hammer

"It's hard to believe this is Peter Papathanasiou's first novel . . . Outback noir has a new star." - Mark Sanderson

"The Stoning is a police-procedural with a difference; a gritty, menacing novel with a terrific sense of place. A highly relevant examination of prejudice and racism in an outback town. Detective Sergeant George Manolis is a great new addition to the Australian crime scene." - Emma Viskic