JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

Dirt Town by Hayley Scrivenor

On a sweltering Friday afternoon in Durton, best friends Ronnie and Esther leave school together. Esther never makes it home.

Ronnie’s going to find her, she has a plan. Lewis will help. Their friend can’t be gone, Ronnie won’t believe it.

Detective Sergeant Sarah Michaels can believe it. She has seen what people are capable of. She knows more than anyone how, in a moment of weakness, a person can be driven to do something they never thought possible.

Lewis can believe it too. But he can’t reveal what he saw that afternoon at the creek without exposing his own secret.

Five days later, Esther’s buried body is discovered.

Hayley Scrivenor’s debut rural crime novel Dirt Town follows the disappearance of 12-year-old Esther Bianchi, who disappears after school on one blistering hot afternoon. Set in a remote New South Wales town nicknamed Dirt Town, Esther’s disappearance ripples through the small town. This close-knit community that parents once considered safe, suddenly doesn’t seem to be.

There is quite a large cast of characters who pivot through the story. Esther’s friends Ronnie and Lewis, who struggle to understand the events of her disappearance, and Esther’s mother Constance, who gravitates towards her best friend Shelley to help process her grief. We also have Sydney-based detective Sarah Michaels, tasked with solving the crime.

“Sarah found that, in general, people were less leery of unmarried, childless female police officers in her line of work than they were of single men. Even if some of them guessed she might be gay, even if that wasn’t their cup of tea, they were less suspicious of her than they were of Smithy.”

Dirt Town is worthy of its praise, offering a suite of complex and three-dimensional characters and presenting an ending that felt fresh and unique.

Hayley Scrivenor perfectly captures the barren landscape of regional New South Wales, moving POV between all of the characters who circle Esther’s disappearance. Because the book blurb tells us Esther’s body will eventually be found, we know where the story is headed. We know, at the end of the four-day plot, Esther will be discovered and we will be close to uncovering her killer.

“Constance’s eyes moved of their own accord to the tall woman’s choppy haircut. The short hair had been dyed an unnatural, fire engine red and was peppered with auburn and blonde streaks. It was one of those haircuts where, however it turns out, at least you can’t be accused of not making an effort.”

Hayley’s writing is observant and taut. Each point of view not only addresses Esther’s disappearance, allowing the plot to propel forward, but we also learn more about that character’s past – their history in the town, their relations with other characters, and their potential involvement with Esther on the day she disappeared.

Whilst I did find the order of events to be a little confusing – Hayley moves between past and present in quite a staccato, chaotic manner – the characters do anchor the story and keep you turning the pages. Hayley’s writing is poignant, with plenty to offer the reader.

“I’d wanted to tell the detective more about Esther. That her parents worried too much about her, not seeing that she could, in fact, do anything. Of course, I couldn’t have said I sometimes pretended that Esther’s dad was my father when he drove us to and from swimming.”

Atmospheric with a tightly wound crime and a pacey plot, Dirt Town is recommended for readers of rural and outback noir, crime thrillers and small-town mysteries. Readership skews 25+

Thank you to the publisher for mailing me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Dirt Town
Hayley Scrivenor
June 2022
Pan Macmillan Publishers Australia

WAKE by Shelley Burr

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO YOUNG EVIE McCREERY?

Evelyn simply vanished. The small town of Nannine lies in the harsh red interior of New South Wales. Once a thriving outback centre, years of punishing drought have whittled it down to no more than a couple of pubs and a police station. And its one sinister claim to fame: the still-unsolved disappearance of Evelyn McCreery nineteen years ago from the bedroom she shared with her twin sister.

Mina McCreery’s life has been defined by the intense and ongoing public interest in her sister’s case. Now an anxious and reclusive adult, Mina lives alone on her family’s sunbaked destocked sheep farm. The million-dollar reward her mother established to solve the disappearance has never been paid out.

Enter Lane Holland, a private investigator who dropped out of the police academy to earn a living cracking cold cases. Lane has his eye on the unclaimed money, but he also has darker motivations for wanting to solve the case.

Shelley Burr’s debut crime novel WAKE is rural fiction about the 20-year old cold case of a missing young girl in a secluded, remote Australian outback town.

Evelyn McCreery disappears from her bed in the evening one night, and there aren’t any clues as to what happened. Her twin Mina, sleeping in the bed beside her, hears and sees nothing, and struggles to comprehend what happened that night. As with most rural crime, a morally ambiguous and emotionally scarred private investigator — this time named Lane Holland — arrives in town determined to solve the case.

“He was surprised by how close it was to the house. Anyone who had even the slightest interest in the case knew about the McCreery dam, because it was a popular suggestion for where the body may have been hidden. It was strange to suddenly be faced with it in real life.”

Cleverly, WAKE explores what it’s like to have such widespread media coverage of an unsolved crime, and how that public scrutiny can affect those left behind — even years later. Every time someone arrives in town determined to solve the crime, a new film crew arrives ready to re-live what happened in the town, Evelyn’s family is subjected to prolonged trauma.

Intermittent forum posts further illustrate this theme of unrelated members of the public who obsess over well-known cold cases. Private tragedies become public property, and suddenly everyone thinks they know what happened to Evelyn McCreery. Most people are convinced it was Mina or her mother…

Of course, Lane does have history that seems to interrelate to this crime, and as Mina starts to open up to Lane, he makes unwelcome progress in solving the mystery surrounding Evelyn’s disappearance.

Shelley’s writing is tight, and the novel suspenseful. I appreciated that there’s actually a second crime that Lane solves in the novel — it’s not planned, but it adds depth to the story and provides what feels like a satisfying result early on in the story.

“Lane kneeled down and ran his fingertips over the dates listed for Evelyn. The date for her death was the day after the last time she was seen alive, when the two girls went to bed at 8pm. It seemed an odd choice to set something in stone — literally — when it was unknown.”

Without giving too much away, I didn’t love the ending. The truth about Evelyn’s disappearance felt a little too…convenient. Too neatly wrapped up in a bow. Whilst I liked how the two disappearances in the town were connected, because it felt unexpected yet plausible, I felt let down by the person responsible for Evie’s disappearance because they didn’t hold enough presence in the novel.

Despite this, WAKE is atmospheric and engaging. Readers will power through this rather quickly, which is always the sign of an enthralling read. With each chapter, Shelley keeps you wanting more.

“The signs to look out for, when searching for a body, were discoloured soil, unusual patches of vegetation, and sections of earth that were higher than the surrounding ground, or oddly sunken. Looking at the Martian landscape, the random hillocks and gullies, the patches of saltbush and scrub, she had no idea how any of that could be spotted.”

Fast-paced, high-stakes and surprisingly emotional, WAKE is recommended for readers of crime and rural fiction — mystery and thriller readers will also enjoy this. Readership skews 25+

Thank you to the publisher for mailing me a copy in exchange for an honest review.

WAKE
Shelley Burr
May 2022
Hachette Book Publishers Australia

The Cane by Maryrose Cuskelly

ONE MISSING GIRL. NO SUSPECTS. A TOWN ABOUT TO IGNITE.

Quala, a North Queensland sugar town, the 1970s.

Barbara McClymont walks the cane fields searching for Janet, her sixteen-year-old daughter, who has been missing for weeks. The police have no leads. The people of Quala are divided by dread and distrust. But the sugar crush is underway and the cane must be burned.

Meanwhile, children dream of a malevolent presence, a schoolteacher yearns to escape, and history keeps returning to remind Quala that the past is always present.

As the smoke rises and tensions come to a head, the dark heart of Quala will be revealed, affecting the lives of all those who dwell beyond the cane.

Set in a Queensland sugar town in the 1970s, Maryrose Cuskelly’s rural crime The Cane centres around a missing teenage girl amongst cane fields. Weeks pass and with no real leads, townsfolk are growing nervous and anxiety is building. What happened to Janet? And could it happen to another young girl in the town, if they don’t catch the person responsible?

The 1972 disappearance of fourteen-year-old Marilyn Wallman in Mackay was the inspiration behind The Cane, as well as countless other unsolved teenage abductions that have occurred in small Australian towns.

“Carmel would have preferred to wear a cotton shift, but the pantsuit gives her a more professional look, more masculine too, which she knows translates to authority. At least Patterson hasn’t insisted she wear a uniform.”

Stylistically, we move between different perspectives in the novel. Each voice allows for a different perspective on the town, its inhabitants, its history, and its secrets.

Maryrose captures the racism and sexism of rural 1970s, largely through the attitudes from townsfolk when speaking with female constable Carmel Maitland, who arrives in town to investigate Janet’s disappearance.

A common thread in rural crime is a sense of mistrust between locals and the character tasked with solving the mystery. Often that investigator is an outsider, arriving into the fractured community and attempting to penetrate the close-knit community to find out long-held secrets or information that may solve the crime. In The Cane, whilst there are some characters willing to help Carmel, many of the townspeople have given up hope of finding out what happened to Janet, and they’re not too quick to trust that Carmel will be the one to uncover answers.

“Janet McClymont’s disappearance has brought back memories — not just for the Creadies, but for all of us locals. Except for the younger kids and a few of the blow-ins, all we could think about was the day Cathy Creadie went missing while swimming off Danger Point.”

Admittedly, I did find the pacing a little inconsistent in the novel. We spend a lot of time moving between past and present, and I feel like Carmel’s presence in the novel felt a bit thin. I even felt like the ending of the novel was a bit of luck for Carmel — she seemed to stumble upon the truth rather than deduce it entirely herself. There is a lot of description in the novel and I think more could’ve been captured in terms of characterisation and potential suspects. The cane fields, for example, were a big focus in the novel and I would’ve loved more attention to characters and their place in the town.

Additionally, there was a sub plot involving a male teacher that felt out of place in the novel. I’m not sure if his presence in the novel, and the suspicions raised about him, were supposed to act as a red herring in the story, but overall I felt his character didn’t seamlessly gel in the story. Other than that, I did find myself absorbed in the story and the mystery — this is certainly a genre I enjoy reading, and Maryrose has crafted an engaging rural thriller that will entice fans of the genre.

“What happens between bodies is dangerous, the contortions grotesque and strange. What she had caught a glimpse of in the barn was the least of it. When people speak about what might have happened to Janet, it leaves Essie with the same sick feeling.”

Recommended for readers of rural fiction — crime, mystery and thriller. This is Maryrose’s first foray into fiction after a string of non-fiction publications. Readership skews 25+

Thank you to the publisher for mailing me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

The Cane
Maryrose Cuskelly
February 2022
Allen & Unwin Book Publishers