Dark Desert Road by Tim Ayliffe

After a series of espionage novels, Tim Ayliffe delivers a high octane, stand alone thriller in Dark Desert Road. Given recent events in Australia it is a book that might benefit from trigger warnings. Although far from the first person to write about the dangers of religious extremism or the “sovereign citizen” movement, its content and timing makes Ayliffe look particularly prescient. But it is also worth remembering that while Dark Desert Road has some issues to work through, it is also a piece of entertainment with two well-drawn, conflicted characters at its heart.

Dark Desert Road opens with a number of strong hooks. A woman hides in a suitcase from someone who is searching for her; a motorcyclist just called “The Courier” successfully delivers a bomb to the home a of a prosecutor and judge and their two children in Sydney; and a policewoman named Kit is still trying to process her involvement in a child trafficking case when she gets involved in a scuffle in at her local pub. Readers soon learn that Kit’s identical twin sister Billie is living off the grid in a place called Fortitude in outback New South Wales and that Billie’s Christian-fundamentalist husband Danny-Lee is linked to the bombing. Billie ends up on the run from a gang of bikies that Danny-Lee has become involved with but manages to get a message out to Kit who, despite their long estrangement, heads out to help.

Dark Desert Road starts out as a pure outback thriller set in vast open spaces and small country towns where bikies seem have the populace either co-opted or scared. There is a woman on the run, an implacable and violent pursuer and a potential saviour coming to the rescue. But Ayliffe delivers something more complex than that, particularly by digging into Kit and Billie’s upbringing with their Afghanistan-veteran father who gets pulled into a fundamentalist church. Ayliffe is interested in interrogating and exposing these ideologies that grew in America but have found their way to Australia (quite literally in this case) and the danger that they pose. It is a tough (but important) subject to consider in the shadow of the recent events including the shooting of police by a man claiming to be a “sovereign citizen” and the more recent atrocity carried out under the banner of a different fundamentalist dogma.

Often with thrillers of this kind – full of violence and gun play – it is easy to switch off, accept that it is a piece of escapism and just enjoy the action. Ayliffe definitely wants readers to do this but he also wants to leave them with something to think about when the pages have stopped turning and their heart rate has returned to normal.

Dark Desert Road by Tim Ayliffe

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8.0/10