DI Dan Clement and Snowy Lane

'Jesus Christ. I found one.' These words are blurted over the phone to Constable Snowy Lane, who is preoccupied with no more than a ham sandwich and getting a game with the East Fremantle league side on Saturday. They signal the beginning of a series of events that are to shake Perth to its foundations. It is 1979, and Perth is jumping with pub bands and overnight millionaires. 'Mr Gruesome' has just taken another victim. Snowy's life and career are to be forever changed by the grim deeds of a serial killer and the dark bloom spreading across the City of Light.

Detective Inspector Daniel Clement is back in Broome, the tropical town where he grew up, licking his wounds from a busted marriage and struggling to be impressed by his new team of small-town, inexperienced cops. But stagnation and lethargy soon give way to a case with urgent purpose. On the edge of the desert, a man is found dead in a crocodile-infested watering hole. And he is only the first. The connection between the victims is elusive, but Clement must pursue it as a decades-old mystery begins to unravel and a monster cyclone brews on the horizon.

In 1999 and 2000, a number of young women go missing in the Perth suburb of Claremont. One body is discovered. Others are never seen again. Snowy Lane (City of Light) is hired as a private investigator, but neither he nor the cops can find the serial killer. Sixteen years later, another case brings Snowy to Broome, where he teams up with Dan Clement (Before It Breaks) and an incidental crime puts them back on the Claremont case.

A violent death by crucifixion near a remote north-west station has Detective Inspector Dan Clement and his Broome police officers disturbed and baffled. Other local incidents—the theft of explosives from a Halls Creek mine site, social justice protests at an abattoir, a break-in at a child-health care clinic—seem mundane by comparison. But as Clement starts to make troubling connections between each crime, he finds himself caught in a terrifying race.