Dead heart. Douglas Kennedy. 1999.

That dumbshit map. I’d been seduced by it. Seduced by its possibilities. That map had brought me here. That map had been a serious mistake.

The map in question is of Australia, stumbled across in a second-hand bookshop by American journalist Nick Hawthorne, en route to another dead-end hack job in Akron, Ohio. Seduced by all that nothing, Nick decides to put his midlife crisis on hold and light out to the ultimate nowheresville - where a chance encounter throws him into a sun-backed orgy of surf, sea and swill, and a nightmare from which there is no escape.