Canticle Creek

Product Information

As the temperature soars, and the ground bakes, the wilderness surrounding Canticle Creek becomes a powderkeg waiting to explode. There's loggers, developers, greenies, farmers, croppers, hunters, artists and local townsfold, all invovled with agendas and motives.

When I stumbled across a review of Canticle Creek on Kerrie's Mysteries in Paradise blog, I was stunned. Her offsider, the Aboriginal Community Police Officer, has been teaching her a thing or two about tracking since she arrived the year before.Where you will meet artists, drug dealers, an observant young girl, a feisty horse and a police officer on an unofficial investigation to prove a young man, who she saved from the system, innocent of murder.

The setting is recognisably Australian, Hyland’s prose effortlessly evokes the baking hot weather, and varied landscape of rural Victoria. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Canticle Creek and would heartily recommend it to all crime noir fans who enjoy a slower paced investigation but with plenty of well-written twists along the way. 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 some very tense scenes, Jesse is determined to find out what really happened in relation to Adam's death, and someone else out there is equally determined that she doesn't.She becomes involved in a murder investigation in country Victoria after a young man, Adam, she knows from NT is the main suspect.

As Jesse made herself known to the local cops, she made some friends – and enemies - while investigating. There’s an authenticity to Hyland’s characters generally, both in the way they talk and act, that gives them substance.

When a likeable petty criminal, whom Jesse previously vouched for, is implicated in a murder in Victoria, Jesse goes there to carry out her own unofficial investigation. A police officer with something to prove, alongside her eccentric father travel to the small town and is determined to get to the bottom of whatever is going on. The sections specific to bushfire were incredibly well realised, I could envisage it all unfolding, minute by minute, and it was entirely frightening to contemplate. He experienced the Kinglake area Victorian bushfires and has written a book about this (from the perspective of a local policeman I think) so I wasn’t surprised to see the bushfire theme in his latest book. Adam is fascinated by the paints, but he lasts only a week before he takes off south, possibly following some woman he’d been seen chatting to.

Also, not necessarily a criticism but I kept hearing parts of this story as dialogue in my head like a voice over in one of those private detective tv spoofs. Jesse Redpath was a police officer in the small town of Kulara in the Northern Territory where she saw more than most and controlled more than most. This is a classic Australian crime/mystery story that brings Jesse Redpath down from the deserts of NT into the dry parched bushland of Victoria to investigate the tragic circumstances that a young aboriginal man who has been allegdedly involved in a murder/suicide. Jesse’s an appealing protagonist, a thoughtful and capable and police officer, with investigative skills learnt from Danny Jakamarra, the Aboriginal Community Police Officer, whom she works with in Kulara. Jesse feels her only course of action is to visit Canticle Creek herself and try to put things right.

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. When Kulara police officer Jesse Redpath learns about the death of Adam Lawson, a young man from her Northern Territory community, the circumstances don’t make sense to her. It is great to be able to learn more as well as have their experiences and expertise acknowledged and used in the story.