In Only Killers and Thieves, winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, the murder of Tommy and Billy McBride's parents in 1885 Queensland, Australia, led to a massacre of the wrongly accused Kurrong people. Five years later, the brothers are estranged, and given what they know about the massacre, its orchestrator—ruthless Edmund Noone of the Native Police, a bush force set up to protect white settlers—wants to shut them up for good. With a 40,000-copy first printing.

"Dispersal" is a euphemism used in Australia to mean the massacre of Indigenous people. In the prologue of this historical novel, two missionaries discover the aftermath of the dispersal of a hundred Kurrong Australians. One of them, Reverend Bean, tells a judge that he saw a crater filled with bodies of people who were mutilated and then burnt. The story then turns to young Billy and Tommy McBride, brothers who survived the murder of their family and are still haunted by the trauma. Years afterward, Tommy and his friend Arthur are charged with robbery and murder, so they run west. Tommy changes his name, and they eventually buy a plot of land and set up a cattle station. Back home, Billy marries a wealthy widow and becomes very successful. He still feels dissatisfied despite his material comforts, dutiful wife, and several children, and he wants to find his brother. Seeking to make amends for past misdeeds, he reawakens the case of the Kurrong massacre and the notorious chief inspector Edmund Noone, who led the massacre by the Native Police (Aboriginal troops under white officers meant to suppress Aboriginal resistance). VERDICT Grounding this story in historical fact, Howarth (Only Killers and Thieves) quickly draws readers into a riveting, action-packed tale of life in Australia between 1890 and 1910. The violent scenes are sufficiently graphic to achieve the intended impact without being overdone. Descriptions of landscapes and characters are swiftly drawn but not superficial; strong women characters add to this engrossing tale.—Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH

Howarth's sequel to Only Killers and Thieves is as searing and savage as the Australian frontier setting that both novels share. After a brief recap of the massacre of the aboriginal Kurrong tribe that ended the first novel—set in motion by 16-year-old Billy McBride and his reluctant 14-year-old brother, Tommy, seeking vengeance for the killing of their parents, which they believed was done by an aboriginal man—the story moves ahead five years to 1890. Billy has married the wealthy widow of a cattle rancher near his family's homestead in Queensland, and Tommy is on the run after accidentally killing his boss during a dispute at a sheep station in the southern territories. Their lives are again upended in 1897 when a witness to the Kurrong killings hires an attorney to investigate the massacre, thus incurring the wrath of Edmund Noone, the Native Police Inspector who perpetrated the slaughter and threatened both brothers were they to ever say anything. Noone is a thoroughly terrifying creation, a violent psychopath whose long shadow casts a chilling pall over the McBrides' and their loved ones. This masterly tale of trauma and retribution is more than worthy of the original. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners. (June)