Dark Wind Blowing

While not all of the events in this novel pass the credibility test, they indubitably provide the basis for a story of accelerating, nail-biting tension. Compressed into a mere nine hours of one particular Friday, the narrative focuses on Australian schoolboy Lance Loosley, perceived by his fellow pupils as the quintessential ‘loser’, and his increasingly desperate efforts to gain some means of recognition and respect. Can he possibly be telling the truth when he holds the school to ransom with tales of a virus lurking in the test tube which he threatens to smash in their presence? This is to be only one of many questions which, Mike, Lance’s classmate and the story’s narrator, has to face, as he comes to consider the most fundamental of matters: who, or what, individually or collectively, is responsible for creating the Lances of our world? Complex in places, though over-simplified in others, this all amounts to a young person’s thriller of considerable appeal.