About the Book:
An Australian western set in the goldfields of Ballarat, The Death of John Lacey is a viscerally powerful story of greed, power and violence from the author of Snake Island.
John Lacey's lust for power and gold brings him riches and influence beyond his wildest dreams. Only he knows the terrible crime he committed to attain that wealth. Years later, as Lacey ruthlessly presides over the town he has built and named after himself, no one has the courage to question his power or how he wields it.
Brothers Ernst and Joe Montague are on the run from the law. They land in Lacey's town and commit desperate crimes to avoid capture. Lacey vows retribution and galvanises those in the town to hunt them down. But not everyone is blind to Lacey's evil, and a reckoning is approaching.
A visceral, powerful dissection of dispossession, colonisation and the crimes committed in their name, The Death of John Lacey is also a moving and tender account of the love between brothers and a meditation on the true meaning of mercy and justice.
Published by Allen & Unwin
Released January 2023
My Thoughts:
This was a gripping and often confronting read. I'm not characteristically a reader of Westerns, but I have read all of Ben Hobson's books to date, I am a real fan of the honesty he writes with and how well researched his books are. Each have been vastly different too; he never writes the same thing twice.
Like Snake Island before it, The Death of John Lacey is gritty, violent, and confronting. Set in Colonial Australia at the time of early settlement, the beginnings of Ballarat and the Gold Rush, it's a story of greed, racism, theft, and dispossession. John Lacey is about as despicable as you can imagine, and then some. As the novel rockets along to its inevitable end, I was bracing myself.
This is also a story of two brothers from different mothers, different cultures. Joe was stolen from his family by his father when his mother died and has been brought up without his Aboriginal family. The brothers are fiercely devoted to each other; they are the only family each of them has. Their bond is one that only death could break, and even then, you had the impression they would still be connected.
This story is a blaze of glory type of Western. A no holds barred, do or die, kind of story. It highlights how dangerous Australia was in the early colonial years, the lawlessness, the brutality. The Death of John Lacey is a confronting yet honest glimpse back into our history, the very worst of it, when the seeds of so many wrongs were just beginning to be sowed. Another excellent release from Ben Hobson. His literary talent is a gift that just keeps on giving.
Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.
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