The Stranger

Description

In Darkwater, being female doesn't amount to much. But Chelsea's luckier than most. She's the young lover of the town's feared leader, which she keeps telling herself is a good thing, what with food getting scarce and the wells drying up. She's secure and safe and can almost believe she's happy. But when a stranger rides into town, gun on one hip, whip on the other, Chelsea can't look away. Especially when it turns out this stranger is a woman. Nobody can say what the stranger is there for. But she brings talk of an outside perhaps no longer so chaotic, no longer something to hide away from - and she knows far too much about dark choices made in the town when the world outside was falling apart. As the rumours fly about Darkwater's bloodied past and the murder of a woman twenty years earlier, Chelsea finds herself being drawn into someone else's terrifying quest for justice. Or is it merely deadly revenge? In a place ruled by fear, Chelsea's going to have to decide whose side she's really on, and how far she's prepared to go to uncover the town's dirty secrets before more blood soaks the ground of Darkwater - this time, perhaps her own. Original, unflinching, gritty and visionary, The Stranger is a stunning feminist Western for our times. 'The Stranger is the kind of book you wish you'd written and yet are so grateful to have been able to read. A wild and glorious ride!' CLEMENTINE FORD, author of How We Love and Fight Like A Girl 'A feisty heroine ... so entertaining.' JESSIE TU, author of A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing

Kathryn Hore is an Australian writer of speculative and twisting fiction. Her short fiction has been published in a variety of anthologies and magazines, and crosses genres ranging from science fiction to crime to horror to gothic romance. The Stranger is a novel born of growing up watching too many westerns and falling for their enigmatic protagonists with ambiguous morals and dubious agendas. When not writing, she works in information governance, libraries, records and archives, and lives with her partner and children among the gumtrees on the outskirts of Melbourne. You can find Kathryn online at her website www.kathrynhore.com.au, or as @kahmelb on Twitter and Instagram, where she has a tendency to post far too many pictures of the kids and the cat.