An organisation called The Cleaners is making threats, days before the Australia Day holiday in Sydney. An Aboriginal protester was murdered the year before.

Lost in the emotional quicksand of marital breakup, journalist Alex Tolman finds himself caught up in the events. Written with page-turning energy, but with a flair that allows the reader to linger and savor, this intricately plotted novel is a cross-weave of romantic discord, family dysfunction, class tension and Indigenous politics. Slow Burn is a work of crackling literary fiction that has aspects of the thriller over the bones of a ghost story.

This is Alexander’s first book in a number of years - a gritty contemporary political work based on race politics and framed within a crime and corruption genre novel.

Praise for the author's previous work

With enormous energy and a scarifying honesty, George Alexander takes the measure of this world on his own pulse, fusing fiction with autobiography, in what is surely one of the more literary achievements to come out of Australia this decade.

Ivor Indyk