The Cull is Tony Park's 14th novel set in Africa and the 3rd to feature Sonja Kurtz, a former mercenary, who is in Africa training local women as an anti-poaching unit when they are ambushed by a group of well-armed poachers.
Sonja is subsequently hired by business tycoon Julianne Clyde-Smith to head an elite squad with the aim of taking down Africa's top poaching kingpins to save the country's endangered wildlife.
But as the body count rises, it becomes harder for Sonja to stay under the radar and even harder for her to know who to trust as she is targeted by an underworld syndicate known as The Scorpions.
When her love interest, safari guide and private investigator Hudson Brand, is employed to look into the death of an alleged poacher at the hands of Sonja's team, she is forced to ask herself if Julianne's crusade has gone too far.
The book is a fast-paced roller-coaster ride which takes the reader from South Africa's Kruger National Park to the Serengeti of Tanzania, as Sonja realises she is fighting a war on numerous fronts, against enemies known and unknown.
So who can Sonja really trust?
Tony Park has come in contact with the war on poaching and the people fighting it in person, in Africa.
"I live half the year in Africa and near my house, on the border of South Africa's Kruger National Park, there's a war being fought on a daily basis between anti-poaching units and heavily armed poachers hunting endangered rhinos," Tony said.
"Elements of The Cull are based on reality. Ex-soldiers like the fictitious Sonja Kurtz, some of them foreign veterans of the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, are currently working in Africa training and mentoring anti-poaching operatives in the wildlife wars."
About the author
Tony Park has worked as a reporter, a press secretary, a PR consultant and a freelance writer. He is also a Major in the Australian Army Reserve and served in Afghanistan in 2002.
Tony and his wife divide their time between Sydney and southern Africa where they own a home on the border of the Kruger National Park.
He is the author of thirteen previous novels set in Africa, Far Horizon, Zambezi, African Sky, Safari, Silent Predator, Ivory, The Delta, African Dawn, Dark Heart, The Prey, The Hunter, An Empty Coast and Red Earth, and co-author of Part of the Pride (with Kevin Richardson), War Dogs (with Shane Bryant), The Grey Man (with John Curtis) and The Lost Battlefield of Kokoda and Walking Wounded (with Brian Freeman).
His next book Captive, will be published in April 2018.
Tony is a keen supporter of several charities concerned with wildlife and people in Africa. He is a Patron of Painted Dog Conservation Inc, a charity supporting the endangered African Painted Dog.
