Where The River Keeps It

About the book

The river doesn’t give back what it takes. When Ava Moran’s mother dies, she leaves behind a warning, a satchel, and one final instruction: go north, find what was hidden, and never stay in Normanton. Ava ignores the last part. In Queensland’s Gulf Country, where the heat turns vicious and old stories cling to the dust, Ava arrives with a dead woman’s warning still ringing in her ears. In her satchel are pieces of a life she was never allowed to understand: a missing brother, a cassette tape, a notebook, and a trail leading straight into a town that has spent fourteen years pretending not to know. Jordan vanished when Ava was young. Now she is back to find out why. But Normanton knows how to close ranks. The locals watch too closely. Old names make people shift in their seats. A man from the past is waiting. And out near the river, something huge moves through the dark, drawn by blood, memory, or something worse. When Ava finally plays the tape Jordan left behind, the truth does not rise gently. It breaks open the night. Because the thing her mother feared was never only the crocodile. Where The River Keeps It is a dark Australian psychological thriller about family damage, buried violence, and one woman’s search for the truth in a town where the river has been used to hide far too much.