"Big Time," Rural Noir with a difference.

Blackwater is a quirky little country town, quietly comfortable in its isolation on the edges of the new millennium. A town that is totally unprepared for the sudden interest the world takes in its existence because of a clock, the biggest wooden pendulum clock in the world. The discovery of a huge mineral sands deposit on marginal land near the coast and the new governments fixation with pushing shires together to form mega shires doesn't help either.

Suddenly the main street is full of inquisitive strangers, punks, privateers and politicians. To make matters worse the million dollars the government had provided to build a space in which to display the clock is missing. The beleaguered mayor has to keep that information secret as he tries to follow the money trail. No easy thing in a small community

Who do you trust? Not Burt Shingles, the towns Chief Financial Officer, who has slunk off to work for the rival shire of Applewood nor his replacement, Dusty Rhodes. Not the mayor of Applewood who wants the clock in the centre of a new development in his shire. Not even the mayor's lover, Sheila Cowburn, whose intense interest in every aspect of what is going on, is suspicious.

Then there's the debt. The gambling debt the mayor's brother had run up prior to his mysterious death. A debt for which repayment is being demanded by a well dressed, volatile young man representing people adept at using baseball bats and blackmail to get what they want.

So what does everyone want? Is there a deeper, more sinister connection, between all the competing agendas? How do you mobilise your neighbours and make them aware their way of life is under threat and, above all, how do you stand up to a callous world and prove that you won't be manipulated and bullied?

Not since the brilliant French novel, "Clochemerle," about the placement of a public toilet in a town square, has a writer captured with such humour and compassion, the vagaries of small town life and the colourful characters who live there as Michael Nicholas has in "Big Time."