Big Bad Blood

The Moby Dick of Australian crime fiction. Ned Kelly Award Winner Dave Warner's complex, enthralling novel that introduces cops Ray Shearer and John Gordon. (`Summer of Blood' 2023). The steamy world of 1965 Sydney: The Beatles on every radio, and a psychotic serial killer on the loose. As a teenager Detective Ray Shearer lost his parents in an arson attack on a holiday cottage. Twenty-years on he's still searching for the killer and his life's a mess with a broken marriage and a sullied reputation as a standover man for Sydney's best known criminal George Shaloub. Fate gives Shearer a break: if he can solve the recent murders he can finally get in the Arson squad with a real chance to find his parents' killers. The only person he is close to is his brother Patrick, on a soaring trajectory within the Catholic church and about to be tapped for a prestigious job at the Vatican. Inexorably, Ray's investigations will bring him into conflict with his brother. John Gordon is an idealistic new recruit on the police force with a normal life in the suburbs. All that changes quickly while on the beat in the sex and gambling mecca Kings Cross. First he comes to the aid of a beautiful young woman, Sue Foley, the transgender girlfriend of Shaloub, next he is one of the first on the scene at the brutal murder of one of Shaloub's prostitutes, the first of a series of murders that hark back to an earlier case of a child-killer long dead. Gordon finds himself under Shearer's wing attempting to conduct their private investigation of the serial killings while his private life swirls around sex, drugs and political treachery. Shearer and Gordon are both trapped in a whirlpool of shame, guilt and hate. Only by confronting their own darkest secrets can they find the means to escape. Only by allowing themselves to be baptised in the river of Big Bad Blood can they save or be saved. And Big Bad Blood is a river that twists and plunges and surges when you least expect. For the reader this is the literary equivalent of white-water rafting, relentlessly powerful, dangerous and unseen currents that will give you the ride of your life.