Canticle Creek

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Though the case was pretty much closed, Jesse started doing some digging of her own and soon started to ruffle a few feathers with her snooping.

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. Hyland’s deft plotting has several suspects in the frame for the murder, and it took me a while to eliminate all but one. The descriptive nature of the story leaves you convinced you can feel the heat coming off the pages.So much so, she found work for him and when the chips were down, Jesse stood up to the magistrate on Lawson’s behalf. Looking for an alternative narrative, Jesse puts several of the locals, and a Melbourne mobster, offside as she noses around the small community. Over ten years ago, I fell in love with two books by Adrian Hyland featuring half-white, half aborigine, Emily Tempest, an amateur sleuth who solved a couple of crimes in the Australian Outback. Hyland frames his plot and murder mystery well, issuing his readers with plenty of plot stops, turns, detours, secrets, codes, suspects to consider and disputes to settle.

The next day when Possum rides over to see Daisy she’s shocked to find that her friend has been brutally murdered. Jesse was told that the evidence against Adam was clear and that the case was fairly conclusive, but after reading all the police reports, she just wasn’t convinced; She knew this boy, and didn’t believe that he was capable of these crimes…nor was her father convinced. I like Adrian Hyland's description of Canticle Creek's settings that allow the reader to imagine being part of the book's plot. 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.Neither of them can believe that Adam would kill his girlfriend Daisy, and everything about the case, including his car leaving the road when he was supposedly attempting to flee with scene, makes any sense.