The year is 1927 on Halfwell Station, over 100 km west of Geraldton, Western Australia. Remote though the property is, a visitor on foot arrives on the doorstep – a friar without a name. He soon becomes involved in the mystery that follows. Eighteen-year-old Ana has discovered a body at midnight near some rocks about 20 minutes’ walk from the homestead. But when she takes him there to see for himself, the corpse has disappeared.

What follows is a police investigation that eventually takes them from Mullewa to Geraldton and Fremantle. When the body is found with no clothes and no identity in a pigsty on another property near Wongoody, The case becomes more complicated.

Gradually all the secrets are uncovered by the Indigenous tracker Cooper and the friar. And it is not only the mystery of the death that is solved.

Alexander Thorpe’s debut novel is an intriguing crime novel. Cultural mores of the time are tellingly portrayed,the shame of mixed and same-sex relationships. It is not often that a mystery novel can be described as different and unusual but this one is – and I would quite like to see more of the friar with no name. Here’s hoping.

Reviewed by Lynne Babbage

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alexander Thorpe is from Fremantle, Western Australia. He has written advertising copy for pool cleaners and concrete supply companies, taught English in Joseph Stalin’s hometown and almost managed to read half of James Joyce’s Ulysses twice (which is more or less the same as having almost managed to read the whole book).

Alex has written for news outlets, travel journals, marketing companies and educational providers. Death Leaves the Station was his first novel.