For mine, the other outstanding crime novel by an Australian in 2021 was Unforgiven by Sarah Barrie whose books are gripping.

When Jesse starts to ask awkward questions, she uncovers a town full of contradictions and a cast of characters with dark pasts, secrets to hide and even more to lose. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

My huge thanks to Ultimo Press for accepting my request to read and review this title via NetGalley. With its sophisticated plot and well fleshed out characters, I raced through this one, reluctant to put it down, thinking about it all the while when I wasn’t reading it. Jesse feels her only course of action is to visit Canticle Creek herself and try to put things right.

Although not officially on duty, she gets involved and starts to uncover a web of deceipt and bigger players that are keen to keep their secrets. 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.

Even for me with my love of description and atmosphere, this was all a little too much and although I kept reading I too often found myself struggling to engage, putting the book down in frustration, to pick up something else in between. Adam Lawson had been in trouble with the law many times and the last time landed him in front of the magistrate, Jesse could see the good in him and convinced the magistrate to let Adam live with her father where he would work at the local pub in the hope her father might persuade him to stay out of trouble and change his ways. There they meet some intriguing characters including artists, welcoming families, aggressive loggers and ex drug addicts. Her offsider, the Aboriginal Community Police Officer, has been teaching her a thing or two about tracking since she arrived the year before. It’s been a decade since I have read Adrian Hyland’s Gunshot Road and Diamond Dove yet both Australian crime novels remain favourites, so I jumped at the opportunity to read Canticle Creek.