A quiet city on the edge of the world ... until an international trafficking ring starts moving in.

Summer 1996. Detective Inspector Jack Martin is coming to terms with the ghosts of the past, and life is looking up. But when a boy falls from the sky onto Tasmania''s remote Shipstern Bluff, he senses new, dark forces at work ...

An attacker stalks Hobart''s darkening streets. A girl''s desperate phone call tells of children in danger. From the forgotten corners of the city''s working-class suburbs, to the select enclaves of the rich and powerful, Jack and his team must work against the clock to stop a murderous organised crime ring getting its hooks into Hobart. Soon Jack''s own life is at risk, as well as the lives of innocent children.

A gripping, intelligently written mystery that immerses the reader in the characters and places of southern Tasmania.

Geordie Stubbs has roamed the world getting into scrapes. He''s seen the trenches of World War I, the union wars of America''s industrial heartland and the rise of Nazism in Germany, and journeyed through revolutionary French Indochina and Singapore to wash up among the migrant labourers who built Australia''s post-war boom.

Now in Hobart Gaol accused of a shocking murder, he takes Dr Hetherington, the psychiatrist tasked with assessing his sanity, on a detailed tour of his varied career and the historical figures he met along the way.

Also in the room is stenographer Marjorie Sproule, who launches her own investigation to prove Geordie''s innocence. But with a media frenzy playing on fear and prejudice against Geordie''s colour, it''s a race against time. Geordie has lived through the great events of the first half of the 20th century - will his remarkable life end on the gallows?

Capital, as Marx once wrote, comes into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” He might well have been describing the long, grim history of rubber. From the early stages of primitive accumulation to the heights of the industrial revolution and beyond, rubber is one of a handful of commodities that has played a crucial role in shaping the modern world, and yet, as John Tully shows in this remarkable book, laboring people around the globe have every reason to regard it as “the devil's milk.” All the advancements made possible by rubber—industrial machinery, telegraph technology, medical equipment, countless consumer goods—have occurred against a backdrop of seemingly endless exploitation, conquest, slavery, and war. But Tully is quick to remind us that the vast terrain of rubber production has always been a site of struggle, and that the oppressed who toil closest to “the devil's milk” in all its forms have never accepted their immiseration without a fight.

This book, the product of exhaustive scholarship carried out in many countries and several continents, is destined to become a classic.Tully tells the story of humanity's long encounter with rubber in a kaleidoscopic narrative that regards little as outside its rangewithout losing sight of the commodity in question. With the skill of a master historian and the elegance of a novelist, he presents what amounts to a history of the modern world told through the multiple lives of rubber.

A quiet city on the edge of the world ... until an international trafficking ring starts moving in.

Summer 1996. Detective Inspector Jack Martin is coming to terms with the ghosts of the past, and life is looking up. But when a boy falls from the sky onto Tasmania''s remote Shipstern Bluff, he senses new, dark forces at work ...

An attacker stalks Hobart''s darkening streets. A girl''s desperate phone call tells of children in danger. From the forgotten corners of the city''s working-class suburbs, to the select enclaves of the rich and powerful, Jack and his team must work against the clock to stop a murderous organised crime ring getting its hooks into Hobart. Soon Jack''s own life is at risk, as well as the lives of innocent children.

A gripping, intelligently written mystery that immerses the reader in the characters and places of southern Tasmania.

Geordie Stubbs has roamed the world getting into scrapes. He''s seen the trenches of World War I, the union wars of America''s industrial heartland and the rise of Nazism in Germany, and journeyed through revolutionary French Indochina and Singapore to wash up among the migrant labourers who built Australia''s post-war boom.

Now in Hobart Gaol accused of a shocking murder, he takes Dr Hetherington, the psychiatrist tasked with assessing his sanity, on a detailed tour of his varied career and the historical figures he met along the way.

Also in the room is stenographer Marjorie Sproule, who launches her own investigation to prove Geordie''s innocence. But with a media frenzy playing on fear and prejudice against Geordie''s colour, it''s a race against time. Geordie has lived through the great events of the first half of the 20th century - will his remarkable life end on the gallows?

Capital, as Marx once wrote, comes into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” He might well have been describing the long, grim history of rubber. From the early stages of primitive accumulation to the heights of the industrial revolution and beyond, rubber is one of a handful of commodities that has played a crucial role in shaping the modern world, and yet, as John Tully shows in this remarkable book, laboring people around the globe have every reason to regard it as “the devil's milk.” All the advancements made possible by rubber—industrial machinery, telegraph technology, medical equipment, countless consumer goods—have occurred against a backdrop of seemingly endless exploitation, conquest, slavery, and war. But Tully is quick to remind us that the vast terrain of rubber production has always been a site of struggle, and that the oppressed who toil closest to “the devil's milk” in all its forms have never accepted their immiseration without a fight.

This book, the product of exhaustive scholarship carried out in many countries and several continents, is destined to become a classic.Tully tells the story of humanity's long encounter with rubber in a kaleidoscopic narrative that regards little as outside its rangewithout losing sight of the commodity in question. With the skill of a master historian and the elegance of a novelist, he presents what amounts to a history of the modern world told through the multiple lives of rubber.