Trust, by Chris Hammer
Trust
by Chris Hammer
(Allen & Unwin, $37)
Reviewed by Greg Fleming
Martin Scarsden is a journo and former foreign correspondent, now enjoying a slower paced life away from Sydney with his new partner Mandalay Brooke and her 2-year-old son. Life is good until he receives a chilling voicemail from his partner. No message, just a scream.
Hammer, much like his lead, was a top-flight Australian journalist before embarking on what has been a very successful career in crime fiction – although he has said that doesn't share Scarsden's traumatic personal history, which we learn about in the previous Silver and the much-celebrated Scrublands.
The third novel in the series is a compelling Aussie noir set in a wintery Sydney during corona – although it's the old stand-bys greed, corruption and nepotism that drive the plot.
And quite a plot it is. Indeed Mandalay's kidnapping is only a taster of what's to come as a swirl of unexplained deaths and mayhem surround the pair, all apparently due to a missing $10 million Mandalay's ex Tarquin Molloy stole (yes, there are some colourful, noirish names in this one, others include Flanagan Mort, Clarity Sparkes and Zelda Forshaw).
And it all seems to point to corruption in the top echelons of New South Wales politics and a secret society whose roots stretch back to World War II.
It's hard to keep up and Trust is one of those thrillers where new characters and situations appear out of the blue and spin a reader's preconceptions and, before you know it, the story's off on another tangent - as if the writer's suddenly got a new idea that demands page-time.
That said, things are never dull and Hammer's too good a writer not to be entertaining throughout but it can test the patience of a reader, especially when the best parts of the story centre on the personal relationship between the two damaged leads, both attempting to outrun tragic pasts and family histories.
Yet for much of the novel, our two protagonists are off on their own hunt for the truth, following their own trail. Scarsden's journo instincts kick in after the killing of his former editor and Mandalay revisits her old bank colleagues in an attempt to unpack her past relationship with the mysterious Molloy.
Prose-wise Hammer's as adept at high-octane action as he is the more lyrical moments.
"They didn't live quarantined from the consequences of their actions; they could not travel unimpeded to new worlds; there was no vaccine against the past."
Hammer is especially good at detailing the unglamorous side of Sydney, clearly a city he knows well - but the novel's length and unwieldy plot blunt its impact.