Clancy Fox, the novel's ocker protagonist, still believes in the tiger, and he seeks it in the Tasmanian backwoods of his home. Stalking the bush buck-naked and smeared with wallaby scat, his relentlessness is akin to that of M, the mysterious thylacine tracker of Julia Leigh's The Hunter (1999). Clancy's true prey, however, is his daughter, River, who vanished in the mountains years ago. Did a magic tiger pelt turn River feral, as Clancy believes, or did her mother's slow death from cancer that drive her insane? When Clancy's abandoned grandson, Jonah, seems to fall under the pelt's spell, the reader is forced to consider the nebulous boundary between the supernatural and the very real, very scary psychosis of extreme sorrow.

Unfortunately, the story's gothic ambiguity is occasionally undermined by Kanake's tendency to over-tell. Instead of allowing the increasingly bizarre actions of her characters to speak, cryptically, for themselves, she deflates the intrigue with moments of redundant analysis: 'Jonah wanted something that could never, ever leave him'. Nonetheless, the novel is intelligent enough not to comprehensively answer its most pressing questions, including the most compelling of them all: Tassie tiger, dead or alive?