Peace

I haven’t really encountered “rural noir” before, as far as I remember but I have to say that I really enjoyed Garry Disher’s novel, PEACE. It is set in a sun-baked, dry farming county, south of Flinders Ranges, the largest mountain area in South Australia.

Christmas is coming and our hero, Constable Paul Hirschhausen is hoping for a peaceful holiday season. He is relatively new to the job, running a one-man police station but is slowly getting to know the people who live in the area and to be known himself, thanks to his community work. He has even agreed to play Santa, deliver presents to children from the area and to judge a Christmas lights competition.

This may all sound fairly mundane. And it is. There is an incident of a grass fire, two boys stealing a ute (a utility truck) and a drunk woman names Brenda Flann crashing her car into the front bar of a pub. A dog goes missing. Someone is stealing copper. Mundane issues reflecting small town life. Mundane, that is, until a strange, vicious incident takes place in Kitchener Street. Who could do such a terrible thing? Also, after an incident involving a baby being locked in the back of a closed car in the heat of the day and the outcome of that being filmed and posted online by an anonymous onlooker, the Sydney police ask Hirsch to check up on a family living on a forgotten back road. It looks less and less like being a season of goodwill at all.

Garry Disher is a really excellent writer. This is only his second Hirsch book but he is an experienced wordsmith, mainly of fiction for teens and children.  He had always wanted to write crime and in reference to his style in an interview he quoted Dickens who said, “make them laugh, make them cry but crucially make them wait". And this is what he does as he leads the reader to an exciting conclusion, with an ending I was not wholly expecting but one which is quite satisfying.