The Island

The novel opens with a prologue set mid-action. Heather crawls through grass toward a man named Jacko, who sits on a beach with a rifle over his shoulder. She carries a rusted machete and reflects that it is February 14, exactly one year since she met her husband, Tom, at her massage-therapy clinic in West Seattle. She is now married, responsible for two stepchildren, and about to kill a man on the far side of the world.

The story rewinds. Heather, a 24-year-old former massage therapist, drives through the Australian outback at night toward the Alice Springs airport. Her husband, Dr. Tom Baxter, a 44-year-old orthopedic surgeon heading to a Melbourne conference, sleeps beside her, along with his children from his first marriage: 14-year-old Olivia and 12-year-old Owen. After Heather nearly hits a kangaroo, an Aboriginal man named Ray, one of a large group walking to the Alice Springs show, helps her and gives her a small penknife made of jarrah hardwood and meteor iron. She clips it to her key chain, and it passes through airport security. The narrator warns that two days later, it will save her life.

Heather's position as a young stepmother is fraught. Owen is hostile, Olivia dismissive, and both view her as an inadequate replacement for their late mother, Judith, who had a PhD and came from a wealthy family with early Microsoft investments. The official account of Judith's death is that she fell down the stairs due to balance problems from her multiple sclerosis. Heather grew up on Goose Island in Puget Sound, a veterans' artists' community, and her mother's family is from the Makah Reservation in Neah Bay, an Indigenous community on Washington's Olympic Peninsula. Her best friend, Carolyn, worries Heather has abandoned her ambitions to sing or act.

The family drives southeast through the Mornington Peninsula. Tom is irritated because the rental company provided an older Porsche Turbo rather than the new Cayenne equipped with accident-avoidance technology. At a roadside food stand, they meet Hans and Petra, a Dutch couple around 60, and two men from nearby Dutch Island who arrive in a Toyota pickup: Matt, a handsome outdoorsman, and his brother-in-law Jacko, a lean, scarred man. The island is home to roughly 25 members of one extended family, the O'Neills. Jacko arranges a paid wildlife visit, overriding Matt's objections. On the island, Jacko boasts about the "Black Line" of Tasmania, a 19th-century military sweep that systematically captured and killed Aboriginal people, and claims the same was done on Dutch Island. Heather notices Jacko and the ferry pilot, Ivan, ogling Olivia.

No koalas appear. Tom, driving fast after an old man orders them to leave, strikes and kills a deaf woman named Ellen who is riding a bicycle. With no phone signal, Heather hides the body and bicycle, intending to report the death from the mainland. When Matt and Jacko ask about Ellen, Heather lies, but she sees Matt kneel and examine blood on the ground.

At the ferry, Ivan receives a radio message and pulls a revolver on the family. They are brought to the O'Neill farm and its matriarch, Ma, a woman in her seventies with an eye patch, a copper wig, and absolute authority over the clan. Tom offers $500,000 in compensation. A deal takes shape, but when Ellen's husband, Danny, arrives carrying her body, he rejects the money and stabs Tom in the side. Tom collapses, and Heather believes he is dead. The O'Neills debate killing all the witnesses. Danny claims Olivia as a replacement wife. Heather argues that Ma should sleep on the decision, and Ma relents, ordering the prisoners locked in a shearing shed.

In the shed, Jacko attempts to assault Heather, but Matt intervenes at gunpoint. After Matt leaves, Heather uses the hidden penknife to saw through her ropes and free everyone. Through a loose plank in the wall, they escape into darkness. At dawn they reach the ferry terminal only to find the ferry moved to the far shore. Hans insists on surrendering and stands to wave at the approaching O'Neills. Petra refuses to surrender with her husband and follows Heather and the children. The O'Neills tie Hans to the front of a truck and drive it across the heath, demonstrating the family's capacity for cruelty.

The O'Neills then form a systematic search line mirroring the Black Line sweep Jacko described, armed family members fanning across the terrain. The fugitives evade them by hiding behind offshore rocks, Heather kicking away a shark. That night, she crosses the island alone and breaks into an old prison guardhouse, where she finds water. An Irish ex-policeman named Rory, who settled on the island after working at the prison and is tolerated by the O'Neills, catches her and shoots her with pellets as she flees, but his second shot is deliberately wide, and he later leaves water bottles on the porch for her to take. Petra removes the pellets with the penknife. The next morning, the O'Neills deploy tracking dogs and a drone. Petra volunteers as a decoy, running inland to draw the dogs away. She kills one dog with a rock before she is shot dead.

The prologue scene unfolds on a northern beach. After Jacko captures Olivia, Heather attacks from behind with the machete, and after a violent struggle, her third strike connects. She takes Jacko's Lee-Enfield rifle and teaches both children to shoot. Owen spots eucalyptus trees on a hilltop, and behind a mossy rock face they discover a cave with a freshwater pool. Inside, Owen reads a prison pamphlet that mentions a causeway on the eastern coast, visible only during extreme low tides at new and full moons. Owen has also been working throughout the trip on a school astronomy worksheet covering moon phases and tidal cycles, and together these details suggest a means of escape.

Heather conducts a nighttime raid on the O'Neill farm. She finds Petra's corpse and Hans barely alive, staked over an anthill. Hans asks her to kill him and contaminate the well with his body. She performs both acts. She drains the fuel supply, shoots the tracking dogs, and fires a shot that ignites the fuel vapors, destroying the generator.

Matt contacts Heather by walkie-talkie with startling news: Tom survived Danny's stabbing. A nurse in the family saved him. Heather proposes that Tom take both children to Melbourne while she stays as hostage, but first insists on a private meeting with Tom. Before she goes, Owen reveals a secret buried behind his dissociative coping for a year: He was home the day Judith died and saw her fall during an argument after she discovered Tom was having an affair. Tom did not try to help her. Owen's medications had suppressed the memory until the island crisis brought it back. Heather realizes the O'Neills cannot be trusted and that the children have chosen her. She sends them to the cave and approaches the meeting point alone.

Through binoculars, she sees Tom in a chair connected to an IV, but his walkie-talkie has no batteries, and four O'Neills hide in prepared foxholes. It is a trap. Tom realizes it and screams for her to run. Ivan pours gasoline over Tom, and Danny ignites him. With her single remaining bullet, Heather shoots Tom in the heart to spare him from suffering.

Matt triangulates Heather's position using her radio transmissions, rides to the eucalyptus grove, and captures Olivia at gunpoint. He shoots Heather in the shoulder and begins strangling her. She stabs him in the thigh with the penknife. Owen picks up Matt's .22 rifle, Olivia grabs the empty Lee-Enfield, and both children aim at Matt. Not knowing the Enfield is empty, he surrenders. They tie him up and head for the farm, where Heather sets a bushfire as a diversion, retrieves the Porsche key and their phones, and drives east. The Toyota pursues, but the family reaches the submerged causeway. Owen's astronomy homework and the prison pamphlet gave the children this crucial knowledge. The Porsche's snorkel, a raised air intake, keeps the engine running as the car crosses through a foot of seawater. The Toyota follows, loses traction, and flips.

On the mainland, Heather turns on her phone at three percent battery and dials 000, Australia's emergency number. In the epilogue, weeks later, she is raising Owen and Olivia in the family home in West Seattle. The police believed her account, and the Australian government is considering returning Dutch Island to its Indigenous owners, the Boon Wurrung people. Owen whispers "M-o-m" to Heather, spelling the letters like a spell. She walks to Alki Beach in the moonlight, remembers her grandmother's Makah word for water, wa'ak, and reflects that she was given a mission and proved equal to it. She waits for dawn, knowing patience is a weapon and the sun will come.