Australian author Michael Brissenden joins a long line of celebrated crime writers – Michael Connelly, Patricia Cornwall, Steig Larsson and Brissenden’s hugely successful compatriots Chris Hammer and Jane Harper among them – who got their start in journalism.
Brissenden spent decades as a foreign correspondent for the ABC, then worked as an investigative reporter for the prominent current affairs show Four Corners before turning his hand to crime fiction in his 50s. In an illustrious career, he uncovered corruption in Papua New Guinea, was stationed in Moscow, reported live from New York after 9/11 and covered innumerable world conflicts.
That experience ensures his prose is lean and focused in his fourth thriller, which centres around corruption, societal polarisation and family. He writes that his aim was to examine disadvantage, poverty, extremism and the pressures placed on small communities at a time of rapid and often unnerving change, with a special focus on the disinformation that has grown up in rural Australia around energy transition. The novel continues the theme of climate change posed by its US-set predecessor, Smoke.
If that sounds like an ambitious agenda for a thriller to handle, Brissenden shows he has also developed remarkable skills at building fictional characters that hold emotional resonance for the reader.
Dust is set in a small, decaying tourist town, whose main feature is a fast-evaporating lake. One morning, Aaron Love, a hardscrabble 21-year-old loner who makes money on the side extracting the vehicles of unlucky out-of-towners who get caught in the mud, discovers the body of an environmental journalist on the arid lakebed. Just days before, he had been asking questions about Love’s missing father, a tough, irascible trucker who made a living driving the interstate routes and hadn’t been seen for two years. The trucking company he worked for has shady ties with a motorcycle gang and is suspected of drug running and human trafficking on its routes.
Martyn Kravets, a Sydney detective with a complicated backstory and a younger female partner, a university-educated idealist who can quote Shakespeare, are assigned to the case and drive the nine hours to Lake Heddon.
The town is in the midst of post-Covid conspiracy theories and political upheaval as locals protest against the government’s renewable energy policy, which they see as threatening their land, liberty and livelihood. It’s a case that will cut deep for Kravets as his immediate family back in Sydney are drawn in.
Brissenden is adept at manoeuvring a complex narrative, revealing the various plot lines with skill and delivering a tense, action-packed finale, but what lingers is the novel’s acute sense of a once proud community in decline.
“For the next kilometre or so, blocks of mostly fibro houses sit in treeless dusty yards on either side of the road. There are corflutes in some of the front yards – hand-painted signs.
No wind. No solar. Big white towers, Big fat lies. Save our farmers. Bugger off.
“Jesus,” Kravets says. “Welcome to paradise.”
This is not your usual Aussie bush noir – which it seems every Australian crime writer, often at the behest of their publisher, is obligated to tackle these days – but a deep and telling portrait of contemporary rural Australia, one beset by outside political forces that are pushing many to political extremes.
The result is a deeply human, timely and utterly compelling crime novel, one of the very best to come out of Australia in recent years.
Dust, by Michael Brissenden (Affirm Press, $39.99), is out now.
