‘What do you reckon this is? Some kind of joke’ This final ironic cadence to Bill Reed’s sixth novel, with its upbeat question asked of death and the literary establishment, is never resolved; that isn’t Reed’s way. In a grand guignol of a novel, ostensibly about the repercussions of publishing an expose of crime bosses in New South Wales (which Reed actually did as the publisher of Australian books for Macmillan), he sets out to linguistically conceal the agony of caring for an elusive humanity he finds alien and macabre.