Late at night Lloyd Fitzherbert, police reporter with the Sydney Gazette, is picked up by his man in CIB for a ‘last-minute job that won’t take a minute’ at the morgue. A body has been found in the harbour. Irma, a beautiful young woman who fled persecution in Nazi Europe, is dead.

She was Fitzherbert’s lover. And, though the police don’t know it yet, he killed her.

Gripping and atmospheric, The Refuge is a murderer’s confession - a tale of wartime Sydney, with its paranoia about communism and spies. Kenneth Mackenzie’s last novel is utterly different to his lauded debut, The Young Desire It, yet it shares that book’s psychological acuity and mastery of language.