Chain of Evidence - Hardcover

Disher, Garry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1569474613 ISBN 13: 9781569474617

Publisher: Soho Crime, 2007

Synopsis

Praise for the Hal Challis series:

“Garry Disher is an old favorite of mine, and it’s about time American readers got a shot at him.”—Scott Phillips, author of Cottonwood and The Ice Harvest

“A first-rate Australian author.”—The New York Times Book Review

Inspector Hal Challis has been summoned to Mawson’s Bluff, his childhood home in the Australian Outback, where his father is dying. Sergeant Ellen Destry is left to head an investigation into a ring of pedophiles that has descended on the peaceful Mornington Peninsula, a resort community near Melbourne. A little girl has been abducted from the fairgrounds at the annual Waterloo Show; it takes her mother twenty-four hours to report her missing. By then, hope is slim that the police will find the child before it is too late.

Challis’ sister’s difficult husband disappeared from the Bluff four years ago; since then Meg has received nuisance mail that she assumes comes from him. While Challis is in town, an extra buried body is discovered when a new grave is dug in the local graveyard. A black plastic bag containing the corpse of Meg’s husband is found on top of a coffin that was interred four years earlier.

With two very different crimes to solve, Challis and Destry have their work cut out for them.

Garry Disher is the author of more than forty books for children and adults. Two of his mysteries have won the German Crime Fiction Critics Prize. He lives near Melbourne in Australia.

About this title

About the Author

Garry Disher is the author of over forty books for adults and children. The first in his Detective Inspector Challis murder mystery series, The Dragon Man, won the German Crime Fiction Critics Prize in 2001. Chain of Evidence, another book in the series, won the Ned Kelly Award for best Australian crime novel.

Reviews

Australian Disher's fine fourth novel to feature Insp. Hal Challis, head of Peninsula East's Crime Investigation Unit in Waterloo, Queensland (after 2005's Snapshot), opens with the kidnapping of 10-year-old Katie Blasko. In Challis's absence, Sgt. Ellen Destry leads the investigation while her boss visits his dying father in the South Australia sheep-farming village he came from (and does some unofficial sleuthing on the mysterious disappearance of his brother-in-law five years earlier). When the girl is discovered, viciously abused, Destry's supervisors are a bit too eager to close the case as the inquiry widens into something much larger. Disher deftly weaves in layers of complexity, particularly the resentful antagonism that separates Waterloo's lower-middle-class families from the town's power structure. A compelling mix of procedural detail and action round out a fully credible plot and characters. Though some of the multitudinous subplots dilute the novel's overall impact, it's nonetheless a deeply satisfying read. (July)
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*Starred Review* Australian crime fiction flies below the radar of most American fans, but Disher and compatriot Peter Temple are making the case that they deserve to be as well known as Michael Connelly and Ian Rankin. Despite broadening his Inspector Hal Challis series to include Sergeant Ellen Destry, Disher keeps the partners apart for the entire book, each of them solving crimes that share odd resonances. Challis has gone to Mawson's Bluff, his dusty hometown deep in the "never-never," to attend his father's imminent death. Destry, homeless following her sundered marriage, is house-sitting for Challis in lush Waterloo, near Melbourne, and filling in for him at work, too. She is tested by a horrific child abduction, departmental politics, and rogue cops--while he finds himself facing personal history and investigating the long-ago disappearance of his unlikable brother-in-law. There's strong sexual tension between Challis and Destry, despite the fact that they communicate only by phone. This is a procedural, with careful, realistic casework, but the character development suggests Peter Robinson, with enough darkness and ambiguity to suit fans of Rankin, and a kind of which-way-is-up sense of the police force that recalls early James Ellroy. Moody, inventive, and extremely hard to put down. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Soho Crime
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1569474613
• ISBN 13: 9781569474617
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 360