Bone Lands

Part of Gus Hawkins

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About The Book

WINNER OF BEST CRIME FICTION at the 2025 Danger Awards.

Bone Lands by Pip Fioretti is a gripping Australian crime novel following Detective Gus Hawkins into a remote town where secrets, violence and buried pasts collide.

'Isn't it your job to stop people being murdered?'
1911, on a winter's night in arid New South Wales wool country, mounted trooper Augustus Hawkins discovers the bodies of three young people. They are scions of the richest family in the district, savagely murdered on a road that Hawkins should have been patrolling, had he not been busy bedding the local schoolteacher.
Detectives arrive from Sydney and the disgraced Hawkins, a traumatised veteran of the Boer War, comes under fierce scrutiny. With his honour and sanity at stake, he becomes hell-bent on finding the murderer. But as ever darker secrets are revealed about the people he thinks of as friends, Hawkins is forced to confront an uncomfortable question: who is paying the price for the new nation's prosperity?

About The Author

credit to come

PIP FIORETTI has a professional background in visual arts, both practice and teaching, and took up writing fiction in 2008. She had had three commercial women's fiction novels published by Hachette Australia and Pan MacMillan. Her first crime novel in the beloved Gus Hawkins series was Bone Lands, published by Affirm Press in 2024 to broad acclaim and won the 2025 Danger Award for Crime Fiction. Its follow-up, Skull River was published in 2025 with the third in the series, Blood Moon due for publication in 2027. Pip lives in Sydney and likes reading, looking at art, bushwalking and hanging out with friends and family.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Affirm Press (March 26, 2024)
  • Length: 384 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781923046559

Raves and Reviews

'A gripping read right to the end.' - Meredith Jaffe

'Bone Lands is incredibly evocative. You can taste the dust and feel the searing heat as Mounted Trooper Hawkins investigates the brutal murder of three settler children. Hawkins is a terrifically authentic character and this is high quality writing - sharp and descriptive - that doesn't flinch or look away.' - David Whish-Wilson

'Bone Lands is what you get if Breaker Morant comes home damaged and unmoored, takes a job policing the brutal grandfathers of the unhinged men of Wake in Fright, and collides with the ruthless corruption of money, power and pride. Propulsive, atmospheric and utterly compelling, Bone Lands keeps faith with both the history and its purpose, delivering a cracking yarn that drives to a shocking conclusion. With desperate characters trapped in the irons of a rigid social code, and tormented by unbounded colonial greed like the ruined landscape around them, it's The Unforgiven mixed with Blue Murder and Sunday Too Far Away, dipped in the Iliad, in the register of Blood Meridian.' - John Byron

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