Dark Ride
by Lou Berney
Good things come to those who wait, my mum always told me. For readers used to a book a year from many favourite authors, three books in 10 years is glacial. But as Oklahoma author Lou Berney (and thriller rarities like John Hart and our own Liam McIlvanney) show, patience can pay. Five years after his award-hoarding November Road, set against the JFK assassination, Berney hits us with another sublime standalone full of heartache, humanity and unforgettable characters. “Hardly” Reed sometimes plays a sheriff at the local amusement park, but he’d be on the shortlist of the last people you’d turn to if in real trouble. He’s a college dropout, shambling through a carefree life in a haze of herbal smoke. But when Hardly spies cigarette burns on two young kids at the local municipal building, something stirs. After notifying an overwhelmed Child Protection Service, Hardly can’t let it go, so begins investigating the family and the father, a tax lawyer in a strip mall who keeps sordid, and very dangerous, company. Berney cajoles us with the nuances of Hardly and a fascinating, rag-tag cast, and takes us on a thrilling and emotional ride. Superb; a best-of-the-year contender.
Past Lying
by Val McDermid
After exploring the past with her terrific Allie Burns series (1979, 1989, with three to come), modern-day Queen of Crime Val McDermid now takes a hiatus to the (near) present, revisiting her popular cold case heroine Karen Pirie – portrayed by Outlander’s Laura Lyle in a cracking new TV adaptation. Past Lying was conceived while McDermid was visiting professor at Otago last year, and brings Pirie into the crime fiction world in new, almost meta, ways. “KP Nuts” and her team are struggling through the early days of the 2020 lockdown, when a tip from a source at the National Library alerts them to a manuscript possibly linked to a real-life disappearance. Did fallen-from-grace author and chess fan Jake Stein really abduct and kill a young woman to see if he could commit the perfect crime, before dying of natural causes himself? Or are the parallels merely the overactive imaginations of those stuck inside as Covid threatens lives everywhere? McDermid delivers yet again, with an engrossing tale in which Pirie and her team battle uncertainty in and out of the case.
The Seven
by Chris Hammer
In contrast to Berney’s five-year gap since his last novel, Canberra author Chris Hammer’s new tale The Seven is his sixth in the past five years. As he has shown since his outstanding debut, Scrublands, Hammer still laces plenty of richness and nuance into the settings, characters and storylines. This time, detectives Ivan Lucic and Nell Buchanan investigate a death in Yuwonderie, a small town in western NSW where seven affluent families have reigned for a century. Their fortunes were built on an ambitious irrigation scheme that changed the landscape and lives. Now, the body of Athol Hasluck, from one of the seven dynasties, has washed up in an irrigation ditch. He has been stabbed and electrocuted. Is someone targeting this land’s self-appointed aristocracy? Hammer masterfully weaves his tale across diverse timeframes and perspectives, including letters from an indigenous employee from before and during World War I, and the events that led to the unsolved murder of another of the even families 40 years earlier. It’s a tale of secrets and lies, resources and wealth. Lucic and Buchanan dig into the past, the corruption and taint beneath the founders’ whitewashed history. Very good.
