The Dead Heart

by Douglas Kennedy

That dumbshit map. I'd been seduced by it. Seduced by its possibilities. That map had brought me here ... That map had been a serious mistake. Rootless American journalist Nick Hawthorne is en route to another hack newspaper job in the dead-end town of Akron, Ohio. He never gets there - because, while spending a few stopover days in Boston, he stumbles across a map of Australia in a second-hand bookshop. "All that space," he marvels. "All that *nothing*." Why not put his midlife blues on hold for a while and light out to the ultimate nowheresville? So he flies off to Darwin - a hellhole of sleazy strip joints and dangerous drunks - and then makes a dash for the bus in a van he's purchased from the founder-member of the Apostolic Church of Unconditional Faith. Spiritual enlightenment is not forthcoming, but when he meets hard-drinking Angie at a petrol station, a week of sun, surf, sex and swill seems like an acceptable alternative. But just when Nick thinks that it is time to move on,