Cirrus@Austlit

' Australian poet and academic Rick Harding leads a quiet life-until he discovers someone is stealing his poems and publishing them under another name. Who is Jason Schultze and why has he selected Rick as his victim? Unable to get the police to take his distress seriously, Rick determines to track down the plagiarist poet himself.

Then someone starts stalking his wife, Mandy. Suddenly the world is spiralling out of control. What was a happy marriage is plunged into suspicion and paranoia. What was a comfortable, banal life descends into violence and mayhem. Who can you trust if not the person you love most.' (From back cover).

''There is no god,' I told him. Then I drove the syringe up into his nostril and straight through the side of his nose.' Joe Panther is a psychotic, alcoholic, violent, substance-abusing heroin dealer. He is also, he believes, Joshua Ben Pantera, born two thousand years ago, the son of Mary and the Lord God Yaweh Himself, not dead yet, the crucified Jesus: still around, abandoned by his Father, abused by the world, and as pissed off as hell.'

Source : publisher's blurb

' Joe Panther is a man with many secrets. Dangerous secrets. He isa drug dealer. He is a killer. He is a private investigator. Above all, he is the messiah, fallen on hard times.

When a young woman is found crucified and decapitated in a melbounre inner-city church, the police suspect the local priest, a man with dark secrets of hiis own. The priest hires Panther to clear his name.

Soon Panther becomes both the hunter and the hunted.Nothing is as it seems-not even, perhaps, Panther's own sense of self.' (From back cover).