Highway Thirteen

In 1998 an apparently ordinary Australian man, a taxi driver named Paul Biga, is charged with a series of brutal murders of backpackers along a highway. The news shocks the country and brings both horror and relief to the families of the victims. These linked stories trace how far the crimes reach: back into the past, as they rewrite personal histories, and forward, as true-crime podcasts and a biopic retell them. In 1996, with hitchhikers turning up dead, a young woman starts to suspect the man she loves; a politician's campaign collapses because his surname is the same as the murderer's; years later a woman in the town senses that one of the victims, never found, is close by, and an actor is padded out to play Biga on screen. The stories move from the killer's country home town to the tropical north, Texas and Rome.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Short stories

Genres

Crime (assigned by AI)

Set in

Australia, United States, Italy, 1996–2024

First published

2024

Author's age

46 when first published

ISBN

9781529389876 (Sceptre, United Kingdom)

9781761067013 (Allen & Unwin, Australia)

9780374606268 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, United States)

9781529389913 (Sceptre, United Kingdom)

9781250390448 (Picador, United States)

9781761473777 (Allen & Unwin, Australia)

More

Wikidata