[3] Detective Inspector Daniel Clement has left the homicide squad in Perth, Western Australia, to return to Broome, the town where he grew up.

His police work is a long series of petty theft and drunken violence incidents until a body is discovered by Jasper's Creek with an axe wound to the head.

But as he digs deeper into the victim's background, and after a second body is found with the same type of head wound he and the Broome police come to the conclusion that there is something more sinister at play.

Fiona Hardy, reviewing the novel for Readings, found the novel "a wild ride" and noted: "’70s punk-rocker Warner nails laconic Australian characters but has infused Before It Breaks with a sharp writing style.

So immersive in its description of the outback that you could almost swat at the words on the page like the ever-present flies and use the pages to fan yourself from the heat, it bleeds casual realism, honest but never dreary, regarding the non-blockbuster limitations of technology on blurry pictures, office procedure and officers learning the ropes on their first murder, or the determination needed to traverse through hundreds of kilometres of searing West Australian space just to interview one person.