The Refuge

Late at night Lloyd Fitzherbert, police reporter with the Sydney Gazette, is picked up by his man in CIB for a ‘last-minute job that won’t take a minute’ at the morgue. A body has been found in the harbour. Irma, a beautiful young woman who fled persecution in Nazi Europe, is dead.

She was Fitzherbert’s lover. And, though the police don’t know it yet, he killed her.

Gripping and atmospheric, *The Refuge* is a murderer’s confession — a tale of wartime Sydney, with its paranoia about communism and spies. Kenneth Mackenzie’s last novel is utterly different to his lauded debut, *The Young Desire It*, yet it shares that book’s psychological acuity and mastery of language.