Scent of the Beast

About the Book

A tanker is discovered grounded on a desolate beach hundreds of kilometers from civilization in the Kimberley region in North Western Australia. Investigators find the vessel empty and crewless, with a strange jagged hole in the hull at the waterline. Was it an accident? Yet this is the third vessel to run aground on these remote and isolated shores in a matter of months. Two years later, Police Superintendent Jake McLynn is instructed to investigate strange happenings in small indigenous communities in that vast wild land. Alarmed by what he finds, he sets in motion alerts in all the major communities encircling the Kimberley. Something unprecedented is threading its deadly mesh through the wilds. Something relentless, brutal, unsympathetic is heading for the major townships encircling this vast land, decimating local fauna in its path. And it’s developing a symbiotic relationship with some creatures that join in its destructive surge outward. Superintendent McLynn comes to realize the nature and extent of this increasingly powerful force and warns a disbelieving world. He prepares his communities and colleagues to confront a foe that could potentially threaten not only his communities but also all humanity. Yet meanwhile, as the threat draws nearer and nearer, political inactivity at the highest levels is thwarting his attempts to avert the growing crisis that will endanger all their lives.

About the Author

The author is a retired man with time on his hands. He has always wanted to write, and now he has the opportunity. He has had diverse employment experience, having worked in marketing and advertising, before finding employment demanding a range of skills including editing and publishing small magazines, preparing radio programmes,, even hosting some children's talent quests on stage. He's also worked as a taxi driver, a landscaper and at one stage a house parent for over a dozen street adolescents. During this period he also took some advertising, social science and religious studies. And this all before he was 26 years old. For the following thirty four years the author was a parole officer, and in his later years seconded for lengthy periods, full time as a Union delegate. His interests are varied between astronomy, planetary sciences, mythology, palaeoanthropology and history. This is his first novel, though he aspires to produce others, age permitting.