Wanted Dead

by Kenneth Cook

Special Constable Riley is pitted against desperate men in his battle to make the peace in the wild rugged bush of colonial New South Wales.

In this exciting thriller by Kenneth Cook, author of Wake in Fright, the black and desperate deeds of our brutal past are recorded for the enjoyment of the modern reader.

226 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

Born 1929, died 1987. Kenneth Cook was a prolific Australian journalist, film director, screenwriter, TV personality and novelist. He is best known for his novel Wake in Fright, which became a modern classic and is still in print, and for his Killer Koala trilogy.

Reviews

[WJEP · Rating 4 out of 5]

Noir Western by the author of Wake in Fright. Familiar Western setup of a lawman tracking down outlaws. The story takes place in Australia around 1870, but it could just as easily have been in Arizona. This is an antihero Western written before Sergio Leone invented the genre. The story is nearly all action but we experience it through the thoughts of the protagonist as he tries to get himself out of many dangerous predicaments. There are no unnecessary descriptions or editorializing. It was effortless reading. I wish he wrote a sequel.

[Michael Poley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I accidentally read a western.

I picked this up after reading Kenneth Cook's amazingly creepy book, Wake in Fright. What a rush! Almost every scene is a tense, tactical action scene set in the Australian Bush.