#Review - Cover the Bones by Chris Hammer

Cover the Bones
Chris Hammer
Wildfire, 4 January 2024
Available as: HB, 512pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781472295712

I'm grateful to Wildfire for allowing me access to an advance e-copy of Cover the Bones to consider for review.

Happy New Year! I hope that you enjoyed the festive season, power you choose to make and even if you don't. For my own part, while the rain and wind of a British Christmas lashed this damp island - just how many named storms did we get? - I was caught up in a drama unfolding in the heat of an Australian summer, where detectives Ivan Lucic and Nell Buchanan - Chris Hammer's dream team - were investigating the death off a young man found in an irrigation canal in the rural town of Yuwonderie. Local accountant Athol Hasluck has been tortured, stabbed and his body dumped. There are political sensitivities to the case - can Lucic and Buchanan find the killer before pressure begins to build on then - and before the Press take an interest?

Hammer unfolds his story across three timelines - the modern day investigation, set amidst a neat, prosperous town dominated by its Seven Families, the landowners who control the life-giving irrigation scheme; a 1990s segment focussing on the earlier lives of some of the same protagonists; and the early years of the 20th century, up to and into the First World War, this segment told in letters written by a young woman, Bessie, who's come to work as housekeeper on a local farm in the days before the ambitious irrigation scheme. At first it may seem a bit of a distraction but as you'll know if you're read Hammer's previous novels, the earlier sections are not just background, there is a complex story being explored in which the events of the present are built on the conflicts - and betrayals - of the past. In the course of constructing this narrative, Hammer creates an absorbing tapestry of Australian twentieth century history, dramatising conflicts over land - originally stolen, as one white landowner bluntly puts it, from the indigenous people - and water, the new source of wealth and power, one that's being wielded ruthlessly by those who control it. 

And money, of course - one can almost smell it around Yuwonderie, a pretty, planned town but with its ugly side, as farmers who can't air won't toe the line are denied the basic essentials of their calling. Yuwonderie is the short of place where awkward questions are seldom asked, and those who do ask them soon find themselves on the outside of things - or even disappearing altogether, as Davis, the designated heir of one of the Seven Families, discovers when he begins to look into the town's background. Money talks yes, but it can also command a profound silence.

All in all, a brilliant read, focussing on a complex and difficult investigation with both Ivan and Nell giving it all they've got (for the most part - Ivan has some family troubles which do destract him briefly, but almost catastrophically). Yuwonderie is a well realised and intriguing setting, helpfully illustrated by  another of Aleksander Ptočnik's maps (thought to call these gorgeous 3D realisations "maps" doesn't really convey their nature very well). 

If you're looking for something to distract you from a soggy British January, I'd strongly recommend "Cover the Bones".

For more information about Cover the Bones, see the publisher's website here.