A sensitively written account that combines the facts of a true story around the criminal trial of a young man from Belfast, Northern Ireland who arrives in NZ in the 1950's on a £10 ticket with guaranteed work for 2 yeas, who never quite fits in and discovers it is a whole lot more expensive to return, if you decide you don't want to stay.

Initially he works in Wellington where he sticks with his friend Peter, a young man from Liverpool who he met on the boat, they move in as private boarders with a young widow and her children, but the letters from home give Albert Black itchy feet and so he heads up to Auckland in search of better paid work to save for his passage home.

He is a gentle, kind lad, one his landlady trust immediately to take care of her boarding house while she tends to a sick friend. A little lonely he begins to frequent a cafe where he comes across a violent young man, who will cause a significant change in his life's trajectory.

The volatile man calls himself Johnny McBride after a character in a Mickey Spillane novel,he is quick to settle any dispute with his fists and his feet and when Albert regrest allowing him stay a few nights and the guy overstays his welcome their relationship turns sour and then violent, resulting in a death.

Albert is tried for murder at a time when the death penalty had been brought back into use (with a change of govt to a more right wing party that was taking a hardline on what they perceived as immoral youth and free in expressing publicly their prejudice against and contempt for outsiders).

The offender is not one of ours. It is unfortunate that we got this undesirable from his homeland.

Albert effectively becomes a scapegoat for a violent message they want to deliver to wayward youth, and with the odds stacked against him, a terrible verdict is delivered.

...in the eyes of God as in those of conscience, what is a crime when individuals do it is no less an offence when society commits the deed. Victor Hugo