By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook.

The mystery of Cam’s death is at the dark heart of an unfolding family drama that will leave readers reeling, and the final reveal is a heartbreaker.Ī twisty slow burner by an author at the top of her game.Ī convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.īack in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Harper’s masterful narrative places readers right in the middle of a desolate landscape that’s almost as alien as the moon’s surface, where the effects of long-term isolation are always a concern. In the days leading up to the funeral, family secrets begin to surface, and Nathan realizes he never really knew his brother at all.

He’s eager to reconnect with his teenage son, Xander, who's visiting from Brisbane, and he has a complicated history with Ilse. Cam had been acting strangely in the weeks before his death, too. Everyone seems to assume that Cam took his own life, but Nathan isn’t so sure, and there’s a strange dynamic in Cam's home that he can’t put his finger on. They’re pragmatic folks, though, and there’s a funeral to be planned, plus Christmas is just around the corner. What was Cam doing by the grave, and what was his Land Cruiser doing nine kilometers away, still fully stocked with supplies, with the keys left neatly on the front seat? The Brights' mother, Liz, is devastated, and Cam has also left behind his wife, Ilse, and two young daughters, Sophie and Lo. Cam’s older brother, Nathan, and their baby brother, Bub, are as perplexed as the cop who’s come all the way from Brisbane to investigate. His body is eventually spotted, via helicopter, curled up by the stockman’s grave, the source of plentiful, and persistent, local ghost stories.

When 40-year-old Cameron sets out on his own, ostensibly to fix a repeater mast, he never comes home. It’s a vast, unforgiving environment, and no one ever goes far without a full complement of supplies. The three Bright brothers are the overseers of 3,500 square kilometers of land in Queensland, with hours between each of their homes.

A timely novel set in the furthest reaches of Australia by the author of The Dry (2017) and Force of Nature (2018).

The lost man review