Review by Booklist Review
The kids from Durton in rural Australia have their own name for it: Dirt Town. Everything is always dirty, especially the creek. Ronnie tells us, "My best friend wore her name, Esther, like a queen wearing her crown at a jaunty angle." Esther goes missing one devilishly hot afternoon after parting company from Ronnie on the parched road home from school. Everyone is looking for Esther, and when she is found dead, everyone is looking at one another through a veil of suspicion. Detective Sergeant Sarah Michaels has her work cut out for her, sifting through the facts and the many deceptions surrounding the crime. Scrivenor weaves a gut-wrenching tale told across a narrative that moves backward and forward in time and offers the reader a highly complex cast of characters, many of them difficult to like. Esther's death radically affects her schoolmates and their families, and the startling solution to the crime tears them apart literally and physically. The main part of the story seems to span ages, yet it takes place within a few weeks. The final reflections are timeless. The book brims over with head-spinning and mind-bending surprises. It will draw the inevitable comparisons to Jane Harper's The Dry (2017), but it proceeds boldly under its own unique power. A brilliantly crafted debut.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Australian author Scrivenor's stunning debut blends a taut psychological thriller with a suspenseful police procedural. During Christmas week 2001, amid a summer so hot that the "edges of the road crumbled," Det. Sgt. Sarah Michaels and her partner, Det. Constable Wayne Smith, investigate the disappearance of 12-year-old Esther Bianchi in the gritty town of Durton. Esther's BFF, Veronica Thompson, may have been the last one to see her after she left school but didn't return home. Or maybe it was their 11-year-old friend, Lewis Kennard, who was bullied at school and telling lies to protect secrets. Progress is stymied with media attention and police support drawn to a high-profile case of missing twins "elsewhere in the state." The cases may be linked and connected to a drug ring. Betrayals, domestic violence, festering family secrets, and fractured friendships delineate clashes among spouses, parents, children, and extended relatives. Scrivenor does a superb job laying out Sarah and Wayne's backgrounds and their working relationship as the well-crafted plot builds to a powerful conclusion. Fans of Liane Moriarty and Jane Harper won't want to miss this page-turner. Agent: David Forrer, InkWell Management. (Aug.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
From the multi-award-winning Andrews, past master of laugh-out-loud avian titling, Round Up the Usual Peacocks puts Meg Langslow on the trail of three separate cold cases when a member of her techie nephew's true-crime podcast team has an unfortunate accident that could have been attempted murder (40,000-copy first printing). In the New York Times best-selling Childs's A Dark and Stormy Tea, tea maven Theodosia Browning is approaching St. Philips Graveyard one rain-wrought night when she witnesses the murder of a friend's daughter and immediately starts investigating--never mind the serial killer loose in Charleston. In the Edgar Award-winning Krueger's Fox Creek, Ojibwe healer Henry Meloux protects a stranger named Dolores Morriseau who had sought his guidance but now finds herself pursued by hunters, with Cork O'Connor hot on their trail; his wife, Meloux's great-niece, is with the endangered Dolores (150,000-copy first printing). Author of the "Hugo Marston" mystery series, English journalist-turned-Texas prosecutor Pryor launches a new series with Die Around Sundown, set in World War II Paris, where Det. Henri Lefort has just a few days to solve the murder of a German major at the Louvre Museum (40,000-copy first printing). In Bark to the Future, latest in Quinn's doggedly funny New York Times best-selling series, PI Bernie Little and his devoted canine, Chet, try to figure out what happened to the woman who reigned as prom queen of Bernie's high school class and now seems to have vanished (75,000-copy first printing). With Quarter to Midnight, the New York Times best-selling Rose takes us to New Orleans, where police officer-turned-private eye Molly Sutton is tasked with helping a steamy-hot young chef prove that his NOPD dad's death was not suicide. Former director of the Wollongong Writers Festival, Scrivenor delivers the booming-big debut Dirt Creek, in which D.S. Sarah Michaels investigates the disappearance of 12-year-old Esther as she walked home from her rural Australian school even as Esther's classmates offer their own insights (150,000-copy first printing). In Schaffhausen's Long Gone, Det. Annalisa Vega recoups from having turned in her ex-cop father for murder by investigating a detective's suspicious death, which leads her to a slick car salesman trying to charm her best friend (40,000-copy first printing). Walker's popular hero, Bruno, chief of police in the Dordogne village of St. Denis, faces Spanish nationalists with plans To Kill a Troubadour after release of "Song for Catalonia" by a local folk music group.
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