Quick Review – Outrider by Mark Wales

Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia (Trade Paperback – 25 June 2024)

Series: Standalone/Book One

Length: 354 pages

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Former Australian soldier and current media personality Mark Wales presents a particularly exciting debut novel with the gripping thriller Outrider. A gritty, intense, and absolutely action-packed dystopian thriller, Outrider is an awesome Australian novel readers will have a hard time getting away from.

Plot Synopsis:

Jack Dunne will do anything to save his son.

A violent civil war. An unstoppable enemy. One road to freedom.

In the wake of a global conflict, foreign forces occupy part of Australia, quashing all but a few pockets of local resistance. The tense stalemate ends in 2034, when Jack Dunne reignites the war.

Dunne is an Outrider, one of the last elite special operations soldiers in the Resistance. As the enemy prepare to eliminate the freedom fighters once and for all, he is tasked with his final mission.

If Dunne and his eleven-year-old son achieve the impossible, and survive, they’ll secure their future across the border in Free Australia.

But the road to victory will be bloody.

A cinematic action-thriller from bestselling author and veteran Mark Wales. Explosive and exhilarating, Outrider is a heartfelt father-and-son story of survival, resistance and hope.

Outrider was an intriguing and complex novel that envisions a dark near future for Australian and sets loose a bold new action hero into the resulting carnage. Set after a Chinese invasion of Australia, Outrider follows formidable resistance solider Jack Dunne and his son, Harry, as they attempt to save the lives of the last standing rebel fortress in Victoria from an upcoming war. Given a mission to journey across occupied Australia to recover a military asset who can provide specialised assistance in the upcoming battle to come, Jack and his son will need to run a gauntlet of bandits, Chinese soldiers and members of the collaborating Victorian militia working for them.

This was an intense and exciting piece of Australian fiction, and Wales really dug deep to present an authentic tale of desperation and war. Quickly and effectively introducing the 2034 dystopian setting, Wales takes the reader right into the action with a series of brutal early encounters that also set the rest of the narrative in motion. From there, the story turns into an intense, Mad Max-style road trip as Jack and Harry embark on their journey to reach the required military asset and bring them back before it was too late. This proves to be an excellent continued sequence, as the protagonists encounter obstacles and conflict, while also endearing themselves to the reader with a dive into their motivations and the history of events that drive Jack on. The second half of Outrider proves to be even more epic and intense, as the protagonists desperately attempt to overcome the deadly forces coming for them. This all leads up to the massive and impressive full on war sequence, with the fate of free Australia in the balance. Wales does not disappoint when it comes to this final massive fight sequence, and readers will be blown away by how impressive the carnage gets.

Wales really dug deep here and produced an outstanding and fantastic debut novel that I just could not get enough of. Making excellent use of his initial plot idea of a futuristic invaded Australia, Wales launches into a sharp and exciting narrative, that keeps grown in intensity as the book continues. Unsurprisingly, considering the author’s background, the action sequences in Outrider are particularly well written, and Wales does an excellent job portraying the carnage of combat to the reader. Each of these action sequences are well paced out and highly realistic (well, besides the highly advanced weapons), and the reader gets really drawn into them as a result as you can practically feel every shot or explosion. While the main appeal of Outrider is the action and exciting story, I really appreciated that Wales took the time to set up several complex and compelling characters. I felt that his protagonist, Jack Dunne, was an outstandingly damaged and angry main figure, whose loss of his wife is still raw for much of the book. These intense emotions, as well as the bond he continues to form with his young son as they journey across Australia, adds a powerful edge to Wales’ narrative, and it helped Outrider be more than just an awesome action novel.

The final fantastic element I want to highlight about Outrider is the intriguing background setting of an invaded Australia. Wales paints a haunting and disturbing picture of how this potential invasion would occur and in what form it would look like, and I liked the dark realism behind his ideas. I particularly enjoyed how he portrayed the Chinese as only occupying key sections of Australia, rather than the whole continent, which honestly makes a lot of sense, and it allows the protagonist to slip between different parts of the country as a result. The dive into collaborators and traitor militias continuing most of the fighting against the resistance, with China and the US playing proxy wars in the background, also had a tinge of realism behind it, even if we’d like to think differently. Finally, the grim details surrounding the invasion add an urgent edge to the plot, and you find yourself pulling for the protagonists even more, especially after a powerful scene where they witness certain train carriages going by. All of this proves to be an incredible background to a particularly exciting and engrossing read, and I loved seeing Wales’ intense look into the future.

Outrider by Mark Wales proved to be a particularly cool Australian thriller that I had an awesome time getting through. An inventive and intense debut novel from Wales, Outrider comes highly recommended, especially for fans of Australian fiction with a ton of action, and it is really worth checking it.

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