You can add the name Chris Hammer to the growing roster of impressive Australian novelists. Even this early in the year, I can safely say his debut novel "Scrublands" (Atria Books, 384 pp., $ 26.99) will be on my top ten list for 2019. Hammer has set his story in Riversend, a town adjacent to the southern Australia scrublands where…
You can add the name Chris Hammer to the growing roster of impressive Australian novelists. Even this early in the year, I can safely say his debut novel “Scrublands” (Atria Books, 384 pp., $ 26.99) will be on my top ten list for 2019.
Hammer has set his story in Riversend, a town adjacent to the southern Australia scrublands where it hasn’t rained for months, the heat is stultifying and relentless, the river has dried to caked earth, the economy is worse than fragile and even the local pub has been shuttered.
Martin Scarsden has been dispatched by his editor at The Sydney Morning Herald to do an anniversary piece on the how the town is coping a year after a local priest shot five townsmen and then was shot dead by the town’s constable. Rumors that Byron Swift’s imminent exposure as a pedophile triggered the massacre quickly solidified into reported fact, and that became the official explanation for what happened.
Martin’s assignment is to merely spend a few days in Riversend to take the temperature of the community and write a routine one-year-later story. But he encounters more than a few townspeople who say the press got it wrong a year ago, that Swift was not a pedophile. But neither to they have an explanation for why a popular priest and mentor to kids opened fire on the men gathered on the lawn of his church that Sunday morning.
Intrigued by the disparity between some residents’ accounts and the reported stories, Martin widens his interview circle, and more contradictions emerge. And then another shock: in the aftermath of a scrublands forest fire, the bodies of two German tourists who went missing at the time of the Riversend murders are discovered in a dam. Could there be a connection?
The discovery makes for national headlines, drawing an avalanche of reporters to the town. Not surprisingly, Hammer’s own history as a journalist enables him to infuse his story with insider knowledge. His descriptions of the competition between news outlets and his nuanced portrayals of a couple of reporters add appealing color to the story.
Hammer has an instinct for unfolding a narrative, laying out just enough facts to nudge you into drawing conclusions, then laying out a few more that force you to reassess. But structure is only part of his gift. His descriptions make every scene palpable, from the 100-degree temperature at 10 a.m. to the desiccated tree leaves that provide no worthwhile shade to the heat-haze that blurs the horizon to the furnace-like heat from a crackling forest fire.
His numerous characters are so detailed in description that you envision their faces, their features and expressions.
“Scrublands” is a crime-mystery that will grip you with unanticipated twists, ratcheting up as it moves toward its conclusion. By the time you’ve turned the last page, you’ll be wondering how long you’ll have to wait for the next Chris Hammer novel.
Fran Wood, retired Star-Ledger op-ed columnist and former books editor, blogs at nj.com.