Nullin's newest residents, masseuse Heidi Go and her screenwriter husband Beckett, have traded Sydney's fast lane for a fresh start in a picturesque little coastal town. Knowing what to expect from a sea change, they look forward to making the acquaintance of the odd local character. Or even the frankly weird ones, like the wild Blackpeters, the wealthy Bankston family, sexy handyman Damian Hill and an elderly anthropologist with an exotic past.
But soon the corpses of native animals start turning up, cruelly tortured and mutilated. And when Heidi makes her own horrifying discovery in the eerie Nullin Void, she starts to wonder if the rural eccentricities of the locals are a mask for something far more sinister.
Heidi crouched on her heels a few metres from the teenager, hugging her knees to her chest. It was damp down in the quarry, still except for the circling of birds overhead, magpies and crows attracted by the smell of blood. She picked up a rock and threw it at them, but they continued to circle. She could do nothing, either, about the flies that had gathered at the corners of the girl's eyelids, in her nostrils, inside the awful wound at her throat.
All around her, she sensed that smaller creatures were waiting their turn, the worms squirming under the soil, the beetles scratching among the rocks, waiting for the skin to fall off the bones, stripped of connecting tissue, to bleach and crumble, what was human to turn to soup for a putrid autumn feast. The earth seemed to be buzzing in anticipation. But Heidi was determined to deny them their meal. She sat on her haunches in a puddle, throwing sticks and gravel at predators, alert for the sounds of larger animals come to feast. Like a Roman guard at the Crucifixion, she thought.