Chris Hammer

Scrublands is a crime drama set in a fictional Riverina town back in 2009, at the height of the millennial drought.

Scrublands

Caroline

Standard crime fiction set on town by the Murray with familiar landscapes if you have spent much time there. I enjoyed the perspective of a mystery from a journo's perspective rather than a hard done by police person. Overall this is a good book to feel hot by and read on a train without reflecting deeply on one's own life.

'Scrublands is the epic novel about rural life in Australia that we need right now ... Remarkable' Sydney Morning Herald A powerful, compelling, vividly written Australian crime novel that will be perfect for fans of Peter May and Jane Harper. A dead river. A dying town. A killer's secrets... In an isolated country town ravaged by drought, a charismatic young priest opens fire on his congregation, killing five men before being shot dead himself. A year later, journalist Martin Scarsden arrives in Riversend to write a feature on the anniversary of the tragedy. But the stories he hears from the locals don't fit with the accepted version of events. Just as Martin believes he is making headway, a shocking discovery rocks the town. The bodies of two backpackers - missing since the time of the massacre - are found in the scrublands. The media descends on Riversend and Martin is the one in the spotlight. Wrestling with his own demons, Martin finds himself risking everything to uncover a truth that becomes more complex with every twist. But there are powerful forces determined to stop him, and he has no idea how far they will go to make sure the town's secrets stay buried.

Pam Sartain

A crime novel set in a small Australian town, plagued by drought. It is nearly one year on from when it suffered a disaster, as a priest shot 5 men outside his church, with no one knowing why.

Martin, a journalist sent to do a 'one year on' piece gets drawn in by the town and its inhabitants, and so when two bodies are discovered after a wild fire, he is involved.

This was a really evocative read, with the drought, the importance of water, and the poverty that drought can bring to a small Australian town clear.

It was a very good crime novel, and I really enjoyed the visit to Australia!

Scrublands is out now, and is available on Amazon, and everywhere else you can find books!

This was first published in Australia in 2018, and Amazon and GoodReads tells me it was a Number 1 Bestseller there!

Reading it did make me think about Nordic noir, and wonder if there could be a surge of Australian crime novels with Scrublands doing so well, and start pondering what that genre would be called, or perhaps it already has a name! Let me know if you know!

I was given this book for free in return for an unbiased review, so my thanks to NetGalley and Headline (the publishers) for this book.

Check out my GoodReads profile to see more reviews!

Liv Harman 

In this searing, “indisputable page-turner” (Associated Press), a town’s dark secrets come to light in the aftermath of a young priest’s unthinkable last act—in the vein of The Dry and Where the Crawdads Sing. In Riversend, an isolated Australian community afflicted by an endless drought, a young priest does the unthinkable: he kills five parishioners before being taken down himself. A year later, journalist Martin Scarsden arrives in Riversend. His assignment: to report how the townspeople are coping as the anniversary of the tragedy approaches. But as Martin meets the locals and hears their version of events, he begins to realize that the accepted explanation—a theory established through an award-winning investigation by Martin’s own newspaper—may be wrong. Just as Martin believes he’s making headway, a shocking new crime rocks the town. As the national media flocks to the scene, Martin finds himself thrown into a whole new mystery. What was the real reason behind the priest’s shooting spree? And how does it connect to other deaths in the district, if at all? Martin struggles to uncover the town’s dark secrets, putting his job, his mental state, and his very life at risk. For fans of James Lee Burke, Jane Harper, and Robert Crais, Scrublands is “a gritty debut...sensitively rendered” (The New York Times Book Review) that marks Chris Hammer as a stunning new voice in crime fiction.

Scrublands

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