A few months back I caught Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 movie Outback (the best Aussie movie ever! If you’ve not seen it, drop everything and go and watch it!), and have been reading a fair amount of Aussie outback thrillers ever since.

Having loved both Jane Harper’s The Dry and Chris Sumner’s Scrublands, I couldn’t resist taking a punt when I saw Gabriel Bergmoser’s The Hunted for 99p on Amazon. Well worth it the book was, too!

The story concerns Maggie, a young Aussie woman desperate to learn what became of her mother following her disappearance several years before. Along the way she meets and befriends, Simon, a wimpy backpacker in search of “The Real Australia”. Persuading her gullible new friend to venture off the beaten track, the pair eventually chance upon a community of feral scavengers with a taste for what Royston Vaizey butcher, Hilary Briss, used to call his “special stuff”.

With Simon offed and her literally having bitten off more than she can chew, our badly injured anti-hero flees and is taken in by the owner of a petrol station in the middle of nowhere. Equal parts The Hills Have Eyes and Straw Dogs, the siege that » Continue Reading.