AustLit

'In the early 1800s an evil demon came to Queensland's beautiful Wunyami Lake inside the body of a migrant worker employed by landowner Patrick Sullivan to dig his private canal at the northern end of Lake Wunyami. The canal gives the spherical lake a bottle shape and the neck is called Sullivan's Neck. The demon has murderous fun body hopping whenever a host died until the indigenous owners of the land intervened and called upon the haunted spirits of Lake Wunyami and their guardian warrigal spirit to imprison the evil foreign demon. Peace reigns for longer than a century until 1981 when the demon is accidentally released by a descendant of Patrick Sullivan and malice, murder and mayhem once again infects the good folk of Wunyami; by 2004 a demon possessed host has established a nation-wide drug network based in the Wunyami National Park rainforest and the Wunyami Crystal Caves. Detective Inspector Samuel Steadman of the Queensland Police Service arrives incognito in Wunyami on the day the local church minister's teenage daughter is strangled; Sam has bought a lakeside cottage in his guise as a retiree and he has taken long service leave to hunt down the Wunyami drug dealers who had his niece Kathy murdered in Brisbane. Danger and murder continue apace in Wunyami and he becomes involved with the powerful Sullivan family. Sam has trusted allies in his elderly next-door neighbour, two local indigenous elders and twelve year old precocious Jana Sullivan. Sam is forced to change his utter disbelief in the occult when he saves the lives of each of his allies. Sam Steadman has solved the killing of his niece and witnessed the destruction of the drug dealing empire and the death of the demon host but he will return often to Wunyami because he has a small but a terrifying suspicion that the evil demon may have body-hopped into a living body outside the Crystal Caves...Sam Steadman is now a firm believer in the occult.' (Publication summary)