Christmas is coming to Tiverton, the outback South Australian town where Constable Paul Hirschhausen is making peace with his exile. That means rising temperatures-and tempers-and all Hirsch wants is a general absence of mayhem.

But the usual brawls and bingles give way to something darker: animal slaughter, dead bodies, missing children, as the insidious gaze and reach of social media deepens the fissures in this isolated rural community.

Peace is the first sequel to Bitter Wash Road and confirms Hirsch and the landscape he is fused to as the new heroes of Australian crime fiction.