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Summary
Summary
"Arresting, powerful, and very much worth reading."--Scott Simon (NPR)
"A tale of violence and redemption in the Australian Outback....Fast-paced and brimming with colorful, realistic detail, the novel poses disturbing questions about the Australia's historic cruelty to its native inhabitants....A complex, sophisticated morality play." (Starred Kirkus Review)
The author of the acclaimed Only Killers and Thieves returns to turn-of-the-century Australia in this powerful sequel that follows the story of brothers Tommy and Billy McBride, the widow of their family's killer, Katherine Sullivan, and the sadistic Native Police officer Edmund Noone
In 1890, estranged brothers Tommy and Billy McBride are living far apart in Queensland, each dealing with the trauma that destroyed their family in different ways. Now 21, Billy bottles his guilt and justifies his past crimes while attempting to revive his father's former cattle run and navigate his feelings for the young widow Katherine Sullivan. Katherine, meanwhile, cherishes her newfound independence but is struggling to establish herself as head of the vast Broken Ridge cattle empire her corrupt late husband mercilessly built.
But even in the outback, the past cannot stay buried forever. When a judicial inquest is ordered into the McBride family murders and the subsequent reprisal slaughter of the Kurrong people, both Billy and Police Inspector Edmund Noone - the man who led the massacre - are called to testify. The inquest forces Billy to relive events he has long refused to face. He desperately needs to find his brother, Tommy, who for years has been surviving in the wilderness, attempting to move on with his life. But Billy is not the only one looking for Tommy. Now the ruthless Noone is determined to find the young man as well, and silence both brothers for good.
An enthralling, propulsive adventure that builds in suspense, told in gorgeous prose and steeped in history and atmosphere, Dust Off the Bones raises timeless issues of injustice, honor, morality, systemic racism, and the abuse of power. With an unflinching eye, Paul Howarth examines the legacy of violence and the brutal realities of life in a world remarkably familiar to our own.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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)
Kirkus Review
A tale of violence and redemption in the Australian Outback. In this sequel to Only Killers and Thieves (2018), Howarth carries the story of brothers Billy and Tommy McBride forward following their involvement as teenagers in the unprovoked massacre of members of an Aboriginal tribe after the murders of their parents and sister. Billy has married and become a prosperous Queensland cattle rancher while the younger and more sensitive Tommy assumes a new identity and roams Australia's vast open spaces on perilous cattle drives. Haunting both men are memories of their role in the mass slaughter, conducted at the direction of Edmund Noone, the brutal commander of the Native Police, an organization notorious in Australian history for carrying out genocidal attacks, euphemistically referred to as "dispersals," against Indigenous peoples. Noone has successfully suppressed the evidence of his blood-soaked past while rising to respectability as Brisbane's police commissioner. When ambitious young lawyer Henry Wells, threatened by the risk of disclosure of his own secret, embarks on a single-handed effort to prompt a full government inquest into the long-ago incident, the McBrides and Noone must weigh the risks of exposure against the demands of conscience. In settings that range from the harsh beauty of the Australian countryside, "a place that [couldn't] be tamed," to the tension of a packed small-town courtroom, their starkly differing responses provide the energy of the novel's often violent but far from predictable second half. Fast-paced and brimming with colorful, realistic detail, it also paints a vivid portrait of colonial Australia in the midst of its transition to independence as the 20th century begins while posing disturbing questions about the country's historic cruelty to its Native inhabitants. A classic cowboy saga is transformed into a complex, sophisticated morality play. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In Only Killers and Thieves (2018), set in colonial Australia in the mid-1880s, Howarth introduced us to teenage brothers Billy and Tommy McBride, whose journey to get revenge on the men who murdered their parents scars them both in different ways. Now, in this sequel, it's 1890, and the brothers McBride are living separately, each trying to deal with the tragedy in their own way. But then something happens, a new tragedy, that forces them to reunite. Tracked by the ruthless inspector Edmund Noone of the Queensland Native Police, whose pursuit of the brothers was launched in the previous novel, Tommy and Billy build a new relationship from the ruins of their childhoods. The author again creates a rich and vivid landscape against which the book's events play out. British-Australian Howarth is a genuinely gifted writer, and Dust Off the Bones should be recommended to readers of the historical fiction of Australian novelists Kate Grenville, Peter Carey, and Colleen McCullough.
Library Journal Review
"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
