Canticle Creek

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It takes a little while to set the story up but it’s done well as the characters are interesting and there’s no obvious hints at which way the story will go. The time she spends with her father is a treat – a grumpy old curmudgeon with softer edges than he’d care to admit, very proud of his daughter but not keen to let on. Despite little evidence to support it, the police assume Adam killed Daisy in a drug fuelled row and then he either committed suicide or had an accident trying to escape justice. A gripping crime thriller, set in the sulty, dry heat of the Australian summer, with relatable characters and a brilliant plot. As the temperature soars, the wilderness nearby becomes a powderkeg waiting to explode with just a spark.

With tensions reaching an all time high in this tiny rural Victorian community, Jesse is determined to expose the truth.

His characterisations are right up there with the best of them, his dry wit and dialogue as good as it gets, and his understanding and observation of the landscape perfect. With her father being a well-known artist, she also hoped he would encourage Adam to take his obvious artistic talent more seriously. Setting him up to live with her eccentric artist father, she's shocked and confused to find he vanished from there, only to die, supposedly fleeing the scene of a murder, in a small community in the hills outside Melbourne. A double murder keeps small town cop Jesse Redpath busy but the answers aren’t about to drop in her lap.

Adrian Hyland is the award-winning author of Diamond Dove , Gunshot Road and Kinglake-350 , which was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award for non-fiction in 2012. Also, the readers will understand that they can not save everyone if they do not want to help themselves. If you've read and enjoyed books like Jane Harper's The Dry or Chris Hammer's Scrublands, I think it's a safe bet that you're going to like Adrian Hyland's writing.The characters were well written and I really felt myself investing with each turn of the page, Jesse Redpath our lead, is a bloody hard nut Ozzie Cop who goes to the small town of Canticle Creek to see whether the police there are doing their jobs properly, in looking into a young criminal known to her that has been charged with murder after events in the town. Her days were long and tiring, but she felt she was starting to get the crime rate down to a minimum. Supported in her determination by her father, they end up staying in the small artistic community that Daisy and Adam had lived in, digging into some dodgy logging practices, unearthing some suspect connections to Melbourne mobsters along the way.

Luckily an invitation for her father to exhibit some art in Melbourne gives Jesse and her Dad a reason to head down to Victoria, and do a bit of snooping around. Trying to help likeable young tearaway Adam Lawson find a better future, Northern Territory police woman, Jesse Redpath convinced a judge to suspend his sentence provided he took a job at the local roadhouse and a room at her father’s house nearby.The observations and asides of these people build a picture of the location, and the characters within it in a very natural, Australian way, and he knows exactly how to convey dialogue, and cadence of speech amongst friends and strangers that just works. I also struggled to suspend belief at times, especially when a police officer, not just from a different town but a different state/territory, rocks up and is largely welcomed into an ongoing investigation and cheesily thanked for her amazing work - we could never have done it without you rhetoric. Canticle Creek by Australian author Adrian Hyland is a phenomenal read which had me intrigued right from the start to the end. At times I did fall into the trap of confusing some of the protagonists, which did hamper my overall response to this one.