Back Story 
 A woman comes to live in a cottage in a remote part of the British Isles. Every few nights, someone or something is killing one of her livestock. There is an air of encroaching menace.... Wait a minute, haven't I reviewed this just recently? The situation is very similar to that in 
 Ten White Geese 
 by Gerbrand Bakker, only here the stranger has come from Australia, not Holland, and it is not geese that she is losing but sheep. And she is a very different kind of woman. 
 Jake Whyte is youngish, tough, rangy, and antisocial. As her choice of name suggests, she behaves more like a man than a woman, and fiercely resists being drawn into the mating game with any of the young farmers on the small island on which she lives, somewhere off the coast of Britain, preferring the company of her dog. She does not know whom to blame for the sheep-killings: foxes perhaps, some larger creature yet to show itself, or human malice either on the part of the local teenage layabouts or a mysterious stranger she has seen on her land? 
 Interleaved with the present-day chapters in Britain are flashbacks to an earlier time in Australia, starting at a sheep-shearing station in the Western part of the country, then shifting to the North coast. Interestingly, these chapters move backwards in time, each showing an earlier stage of Jake's back story--her outback story, to coin a phrase. At the beginning, we see her as an unusually competent shearer, able to handle the sheep as well as any of the men. It seems she is on the run from something, and we get more than a hint of sexual abuse. Each of the even-numbered chapters confirms the general sense of our suspicions, but also alters them: there is trauma, for sure, but it is not necessarily of the kind we had thought. With brilliant skill, Wyld keeps us guessing right up to the end, but with each answer we come to feel more deeply for Jake as a person. 
 I wish the island chapters were quite so good. Yes, the descriptions of farm life are excellent, and while the book jacket may be exaggerating to talk of "hard-won redemption," Jake's life does begin to change as she unexpectedly opens up to another human being. But whereas the Australian scenes were entirely realistic, there is a distinct Gothic element here that is never fully resolved. I was disturbed, for instance, not to be able to place the setting; there are no English islands that fill the bill, and it did not seem like any of the Scottish ones. And the mystery of the sheep killings is never really solved, but seems to turn into some kind of metaphor. I had no trouble going with it for almost all the book, but in the end I felt just slightly let down, turning high four stars into a still-complimentary three-point-something.