Slow Burn, Alexander’s second novel, is sporadically engaging. While briskly paced and written from a position of empathy with the plight of Aborigines in a frequently hostile and violent country, its allegiances are disastrous to any corresponding ambiguity and moral complexity. The Cleaners are repugnant, one-dimensional thugs, weighed down by ockerisms and gun talk, while the Aboriginal characters are uniformly earthy, spiritual and good-humoured. Add a journalist with marital problems and an Italian philanderer, and you have a novel burdened by cliché.

Alexander’s prose is direct and often impressive, but it frequently strays into poeticism. The author rarely misses a chance to describe the weather (‘blank afternoons as grey as silos, where time would be scissored off like folding lengths of cloth in the textile factories’), though his fine observations of local details (racially divided cemeteries, inner-city white noise) make up for these indulgences. An odd tension exists in the book between its heavy-going descriptive passages and its thriller-like set-up, one that is never fully resolved. Too often the novel feels sidetracked or held up by its own style. Slow Burn, though a worthy book about a serious topic, is too circumscribed by its ethical and intellectual certitude to engage or trouble a reader for very long.