In the line of fire
Karin Slaughter’s latest is an intense tale of a woman discovering her mother is armed and dangerous.
Atlanta author Karin Slaughter has a résumé full of knuckle-whitening stories that often veer to the darker edges of crime while also offering plenty of humanity in characters and relationships. In PIECES OF HER (HarperCollins,
$36.99), she stomps the adrenalin pedal hard to the floor. Andy is a listless young woman who jettisoned Big Apple dreams to return to her Southern hometown when her mother got breast cancer. Andy’s meandering life is torn from its axis on her 31st birthday, when a mall-cafe lunch is interrupted by a crazed gunman. Seeing two people killed is shocking, but not as much as her post-mastectomy, middleaged Mum calmly confronting and dispatching the culprit. When other scary events follow, Andy flees across country, her lifelong anchor lines sliced. Slaughter deftly keeps readers off-kilter throughout an intense and twisting tale, switching between Andy’s present-day flight and the escapades of a cult-like group of activists in the 1980s. Themes of identity and atonement entwine across the timelines. Little is what it seems in this rapid read.
Rod Reynolds takes readers even further back in time in COLD DESERT SKY (Faber,
$32.99). His third novel starring Charlie Yates sees the jaded journo back in Los Angeles and obsessively investigating the disappearance of two aspiring actresses. It’s 1946: the country is adjusting to peacetime after A-bombs ended the war, the “Golden Age” studio system is still in full swing in Hollywood and, a few miles outside downtown Las Vegas, mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel is building the Flamingo Hotel. Yates and his wife, Lizzie, are desperate to avoid Siegel’s attention, but the search for the missing women brings them dangerously into the gangster’s orbit, and that of a rogue FBI agent. British author Reynolds delivers an evocative tale full of mid-20thcentury American hard-boiled traditions – terse dialogue, violent gangsters, a near self-destructive hero – while offering something fresh. The involvement and influence of Lizzie are fascinating counterpoints in a masculine era. Reynolds scratches at the US underbelly, skewers glitz and fantasy. Mirages don’t occur only in empty deserts.
Chris Hammer spent years globe trotting as a foreign correspondent for Australian TV, before setting his phenomenal debut closer to home. SCRUBLANDS (Allen & Unwin,
$36.99) meshes sociological insights, literary stylings and a multi-layered crime tale into an epic novel that’s simply superb. Martin Scarsden is sent to drought-stricken Riversend by his Sydney editor, ostensibly to write a human-interest tale about the town’s recovery a year after a church shooting, but also to gauge his own recovery after a near-death experience in the Middle East. Some locals tell Martin there’s more to the story than the “paedophile priest” narrative that followed the shooting. When the bodies of two backpackers are found, the national media descends, messily picking at the dying town’s carcass. Can Martin find the truth among all the lies and manipulations? Hammer brings rural Australia, its towns, people and issues, to extraordinarily vivid life. There’s sweatinducing authenticity. Comparisons to Jane Harper’s The Dry are unavoidable, but Hammer’s debut reaches even further, taking the baton from the great Peter Temple. Scrublands is crime writing at its absolute finest.