ABOUT THE BOOK

When overworked forensic pathologist Nicola Fox arrives for a long-overdue break at her holiday house in Brunswick Heads, on the NSW north coast, she’s shocked to discover someone sunbaking on one of the sun lounges in her backyard. And that the sunbaker has been dead for some time.

Rumours soon emerge that the sunbaker took more than a few dark secrets to his grave, secrets many people – and especially the police – were keen to bury. When the arse-covering and finger-pointing begin in earnest, Nicola finds herself a suspect.

New to town, she only knows one person who might be able to save her: Jack Harris, a journalist at the local newspaper, The Beacon. When he begins investigating, the police organised crime unit arrives, and soon they are threatening both him and Nicola, leaving Jack to wonder if it was the police themselves who had committed the crime.

Can Jack uncover who really killed the sunbaker, and why the body was left in the backyard of a forensic pathologist, before the escalating threats to his own wellbeing become more than just threats?

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Chapter One

Monday, 6 January

Nicola Fox was doomscrolling on her phone. She’d normally work through her breaks, but the backlog of autopsy reports to finalise was now so monumental the only healthy way to deal with it was denial. She laughed out loud at a headline; a woman had accidentally joined a search party looking for herself.

‘C’mon, focus,’ she muttered, ‘those reports aren’t going to write themselves’. She put down her phone and logged back into her computer. The backlog wasn’t because more people were dying unexpectedly, rather, finalising each report took so much longer since the hospital administrators had replaced all the highly experienced typists with computer voice recognition. There were so many errors, and they were hard to find because they often sounded correct. Proofreading required hypervigilance. Or was it hypervigilance?

A sudden sound caught her attention. Perhaps something metallic being dropped in the corridor. At least that’s what she thought she heard. The second sound was much louder. A crash – definitely a metal something clattering as it bounced across the floor. She stopped typing and looked towards the door. What was that? There was no doubting the third sound – a loud shriek that went on and on until it cut off abruptly, leaving a resounding silence.

Nicola raced from her office into the corridor. Left or right? She heard laboured breathing. And grunting. Left. The anteroom. She threw open the door and ran to the observation window.

Mr McKenzie lay on the slab, mid-autopsy, his gaping abdomen revealing glistening loops of bowel. That wasn’t unexpected. What was unexpected was that her boss, Bernard Henderson, was nowhere to be seen. Nor was Karen, their new mortuary assistant, who should also have been in the room, attending her first autopsy.

Nicola could still hear a rhythmic, guttural grunting. She barged through the doors into the autopsy suite and found Karen, out cold, lying on the floor, her chest rising and falling gently with each breath, but her eyes staring vacantly. A large red lump of flesh snuggled up against her right cheek, almost like a pillow. A liver. Presumably Mr McKenzie’s. Lying beside it was an upturned stainless-steel dish. Blood was smeared on her cheeks and gown. Poor Karen must have fainted.

Then Nicola saw Bernard, also on the floor. His face had a shocking blue pallor and his arms and legs were jerking violently backwards and forwards, his laboured breathing erupting in grunts. He was having an epileptic seizure.

Nicola’s training kicked in: she shouted for help, hit the emergency call button on the wall and turned back to the chaos. Who should she help first? Karen was in no imminent danger of death: pink skin, breathing quietly. She’d recover soon without assistance. But Bernard did need help. She rolled him onto his side, supporting him as the jerking of his limbs continued. Why was he having a seizure? In the ten years she’d known him, he’d never mentioned he had epilepsy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

P A Thomas studied medicine in Newcastle, New South Wales, undertook specialist training in nuclear medicine at the Mayo Clinic in the USA, and now works as a specialist at a public hospital in Brisbane. He is also a wilderness landscape photographer. He has had many joint and solo exhibitions, and his images have appeared in Australian Geographic publications.

He lives in the Byron Bay region, the setting for his first novel, The Beacon, and its sequel, The Sunbaker.