Australian crime fiction maestro Garry Disher has made many fans throughout his 60-book career but his latest series, featuring country policeman Hirsch, stuck in a dusty quiet town in rural South Australia, might not win him new ones, for it is decidedly low key. Mischance Creek, the fifth in the series, offers an especially sedate first half, as Hirsch alternates routine firearm checks with helping a foreign woman investigating the strange death and disappearance of her parents seven years earlier. Disher creates with loving care the setting of a region beset with an unusually savage Australian drought but the pace is a steady acceleration of seemingly humdrum minor crimes intermingled with Hirsch’s itchy life. Then, just as the reader wonders how Mischance Creek slots into the rural crime fiction genre, with the plotting precision of a master, Disher revs up the action into an onslaught of connecting strands, into a classic battle for justice against mysterious monsters. The final quarter of Mischance Creek is a tour de force and a reminder to all Disher’s fans: let us hope Hirsch returns again and again.
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