Books
The Devil’s Eye
Courtesy Fourth Estate
It’s March 1899 and one of the fiercest storms in history is brewing – a cyclone named Mahina.
To a remote part of the Queensland coast come the hundreds of sails of the northern pearling fleets, and a native policeman trying to solve a murder.
Nearly two thousand men, women and children are gathering around Cape Melville, right in the path of the storm that is about to cause Australia’s deadliest natural disaster.
Based on real events, this is the story of an unstoppable force of nature and the birth and death of an Australian dream.
This is Ian’s second novel and another historical masterpiece, based on three years of research, and a tale of fiction woven around true events as Cyclone Mahina hits Cape York.
Affection
Courtesy Fourth Estate
Townsville, 1900: At the end of a sweltering North Queensland summer, a steamer arrives in this tropical outpost carrying 52 passengers and a case of the plague.
In this frontier town most people are too busy to be bothered with any damned foreign disease. Colonial Queensland is on the cusp of a new century and a new nation. The north is ruled by men with empires and railway lines to build. The passengers and crew of the SS Cintra are quarantined on an island and ignored.