Jessie Brewster, a naïve, thirty-year-old farmer from the Australian bush, travels to the city for the first time in his life, where he quickly becomes educated in the ways of city living. Robbed of all his worldly possessions by a prostitute, he finds himself a job as a 'courier', which leads him into Sydney's sordid underworld around the docks. Jessie unwittingly finds himself in the company a rich, spoilt, obnoxious sixteen-year-old girl called Rose. Circumstances beyond their control put them in the centre of a terrifying cat and mouse chase through the coastal towns of New South Wales and Queensland. During their flight, Jessie discovers increasingly frightening and disturbing things about Rose. And Rose discovers things in Jessie that make her hate him with steadily increasing vengeance. The pair's flight takes them into some very murky places, where they come into conflict with the lowest of the low. Jessie needs to continually put his life on the line to protect Rose from injury and death. He receives no thanks, only ridicule and insults from this spoilt, over-indulged teenager. The story climaxes in a frenzy of bloodshed and murder, where more chilling things are revealed about Rose, her criminal family and the underworld figures who are pursuing the pair. When all seems to be lost for both Jessie and Rose, fate intervenes. Their desperate fight for survival ends in a gut-wrenching twist that neither of them can see coming. This is a story that explores the conflict of two human beings who are the complete antipathy of one other in every way imaginable, forced together through circumstance beyond their control. They experience the entire gamut of negative emotions during their ordeal: hatred, repulsion, distrust, deceit and aversion, as they try to survive the death-defying challenges that are placed before them. Through all the strife and disharmony they discover things about themselves that radically change the way they see each other.