Martin's life has aimlessly drifted to unbearable depths. He is a small-town bank manager with a wife who spends her nights out partying and sleeping with an array of abattoir workers and truck drivers passing through town. His teenage step-children barely tolerate him and to top things off, his job has just been made redundant with the imminent closure of his bank branch. In his usual bleary daze, and with a sense of inevitability, he heads off to his last day of work, preparing to receive a huge payroll with the bank's last official duty being to pay the local meat workers who have all received their own redundancy cheques.

No one is more surprised than Martin when, during the staff's meagre final party, he pulls a gun and proceeds to rob his own bank. What follows is one of the more unorthodox and disorganised hold-ups that you would ever see, but then again, also one of the more successful too. The entire scene makes for some very entertaining reading.

Martin makes good his escape in the local cop's police car but, being a spur of the moment sort of thing, really has little idea about where he's going or what he's going to do. With a million dollars of stolen money in plastic bags in a stolen police car wearing a police uniform that obviously doesn't fit him, Martin's life has just become significantly more complicated.

Martin isn't on the run for long when he stumbles upon Faith, an attractive forty-something who is having her own bad day. After saving each other from a rather nasty situation they naturally throw their lots together and continue heading north – the police car having been ditched, to be replaced by a motorcycle and sidecar.

Almost by instinct Martin is heading north towards Queensland to the one person he can think of that he can call a friend, Jack Stark. Now known as the Mad Major, Stark used to go to school with Martin but they lost contact 25 years ago, a sad indictment on how grim his life had become, when the best friend has not been contacted for so long…and mad to boot!

The road to Queensland is long, particularly when travelling in a sidecar crammed with a million bucks in banknotes. This is compulsive reading with Martin and Faith's journey frequently punctuated with unusual characters such as a bikie operated old folks home, a feisty couple of caravanning pensioners not to mention high cuisine meals in some of the most unexpected places. To keep them on their toes they are also being pursued by some of the most determined and dangerous killers you would never want to meet.

McGeachin writes with a cheeky good-humoured tone that places every situation on a borderline farcical level, yet still zips in a more serious message. Behind the rough and tumbled flight up the coast of New South Wales comes a story about escape and renewal. We see an escape from a boring, failing life, from cancer, from a dead end job and a failing marriage. There is an exciting vitality to their new life that is instantly palpable in a very breathtaking way. Of course, you have to ignore the fact that to get there they both committed crimes and they have a killer on their heels.

It's the inclusion of their pursuer that adds that much needed element of impending danger that helps sober you up from all of Martin and Faith's amusing encounters along the road. It also angles us in to a dramatic and furious finale that literally rocks their world.

Fat, Fifty & F***ed is a very satisfying adventure / romantic comedy with an undercurrent of impending danger that is relentlessly overpowered by the irrepressible personalities of the principle characters. It's an effortlessly entertaining story that will have you itching to hit the open road yourself.