Silver

Fittingly, I read most of Chris Hammer's second novel, Silver, in a seaside town, though one located on the Mornington Peninsula near Melbourne rather than the north coast of New South Wales like the fictional town of Port Silver. Silver takes place in the months after Scrublands; journalist Martin Scarsden has finished his true crime book (don't we all wish we could bang out a whole book in a month or so?) and is joining new partner Mandy and her baby son Liam in his old hometown where she's inherited a house. Overlook the coincidence -- there are more to come.

Silver is a well-constructed mystery with the now familiar Hammer ingredients of shenanigans around real estate, buried secrets and unsuspected connections. I really enjoyed the sections where Martin is schlepping around with Liam; we don't often see investigations carried out with a toddler in tow, and the detective having to worry about nappies and baby food (conveniently, Liam falls asleep in the car a lot). Martin's own traumatic family past is fleshed out for the first time, and we meet his uncle Vern and his Aboriginal wife. The pace is less frenetic than in Scrublands, but there's plenty of action -- a corpse in the first few pages, several historic violent deaths, a fist fight on the beach, and a mass poisoning before the novel's end. Martin often acts like a dick, despite his bonding with Liam (luckily there is private childcare available whenever it's not possible for either Mandy or Martin to look after him), and Mandy gets realistically fed up with him.

Silver forms the basis of the second season of Scrublands, available on streaming, and now I've polished off the book I can't wait to get stuck into the TV version. If it's anything like Scrublands season one, it will simplify the plot considerably and delete a few storylines to compress it into four episodes instead of 560 pages.