Publisher's Synopsis
Leon Spar came to Detour with his life in pieces, desperate to find resolution unaware he had come to the end of the world where men, superstition and nature collide in supernatural catastrophes. A no-man's land that like a desolate beach separates two worlds from ever meeting. The outback, dead and blistered by legend, brutal with heat, against the force of an earth-soaked curse, as overwhelming as the great oceans tide and hell-bent by design for revenge. Between these two worlds Spar takes up his latest assignment with Coastal Surveillance in the fishing industry of Detour, a community built by the ignorant manufacture of man's efforts to survive in a landscape few could ever understand, and none had the right to claim or own. With a natural love and empathy for the sea, Spars self-destructive attitude towards people quickly draws the towns hatred. His slow awakening into a legacy of Aboriginal folklore that haunts the town, holds him to a bare thread of sanity and a precarious line between a smuggling ring desperate for secrecy, a police sergeant desperate to keep the peace, a hit man's contract bent on silencing him, and an Aboriginal elder desperate to prevent the on-coming destruction of an ancient horror. Once Upon a Bad Time is an Australian adventure as epic as the Dreamtime myths of the outback. Where once nomadic tribes reined with their gods, now just the odd, remote town clings to a sunburnt land deformed by centuries of aboriginal superstitions. A few will survive, most will be swallowed alive...
