The dead heart - Douglas Kennedy

That dumbshit map.
I'd been seduced by it.
Seduced by its possibilities.
That map had brought me here ... That map had been a serious mistake'

The map in question is of Australia, stumbled across in a second-hand bookshop by American journalist Nick Hawthorne, en route to another dead-end hack job in Akron, Ohio.
Seduced by all that wilderness, all that NOTHING, Nick decides to put his midlife crisis on hold and light out to the ultimate nowheresville - where a chance encounter throws him into a sun-baked orgy of surf, sex and swill, and a nightmare from which there is no escape.

'Douglas Kennedy might never be allowed into Australia again.
This is a crazy, compulsive ultimately serious thriller and a bravura fictional debut from one of our best travel writers' Philip Kerr