Only Killers and Thieves

November 27, 2017
A quest for frontier justice drives the events of Howarth’s devastating and impressive debut, set in the Australian outback in 1885. Sixteen-year-old Billy McBride and his 14-year-old brother, Tommy, are orphaned when, they believe, their rancher father’s disgruntled aboriginal stockman guns down their parents and younger sister in cold blood. Enlisting the help of neighboring rancher John Sullivan (with whom their father had a prickly relationship) and Edmund Noone, an inspector with the Native Mounted Police, the boys embark on a manhunt. Things quickly go awry when their confederates use evidence Billy fabricated as a pretext to slaughter the alleged culprit’s entire tribe. This atrocity is emblematic of the novel’s theme concerning the strained relations between white settlers and the natives whom they have displaced from their lands. Howarth skillfully uses the fraying relationship between the two brothers—Billy embraces vigilantism with vengeful zeal, while Tommy is revolted by both the carnage and its effect on his brother—to illustrate the moral issues at the heart of his story. The narrative is empowered further by his searing descriptions of the outback, a drought-ridden landscape of desiccation and death that provides a backdrop as bleak and merciless as the characters who move against it.

David Linski's voice conjures the heat and dust of the Australian Outback of the 1800s. Howarth's audiobook is a bleak tale in which childhood innocence isn't lost--it's obliterated. Two teenage boys, 14-year-old Tommy and 16-year-old Billy, are forced to seek revenge after their family is slaughtered. Sullivan, the landowner to whom the family is indebted, takes responsibility for the children; however, Sullivan's intentions, and the law enforcement with whom he's involved, have ulterior motives in their mission of retribution. Linski's stoic, tense narration complements the tone of this dark but compelling Western, which is both a gripping thriller and a powerful story of masculinity, race, and identity. S.P.C. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

January 1, 2018

DEBUT In this powerful debut novel, set in 1870s Australia, two teenage brothers ride into the desert interior, along with an unscrupulous neighbor and a cadre of the infamous Native Police Force, to avenge the deaths of the boys' family. Billy is the elder, but Tommy, the central protagonist, is more intuitive and comes to realize the troop's actual intent: a genocidal raid on remaining aboriginal inhabitants. With sweeping descriptions of landscape and the journey's hardships, the novel feels like a modern Western along the lines of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. Howarth's narrative is almost cinematic and, like a modern Western film, includes scenes of graphic violence. Tommy's empathy with the natives he encounters immerses readers in the history of Australia's treatment of its indigenous people. Howarth is British but lived in Australia for several years and here draws on his research of the Queensland Native Police Force. U.S. readers will make the connection with our country's oppression of Native Americans and gain an understanding of the fundamental racism of both former British colonies. VERDICT Highly recommended; Howarth is a novelist to watch.--Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

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