Scrublands: The Sunday Times Crime Book of the Year, soon to be a major TV series

For the great majority of our reading group this was a much enjoyed book. It was beautifully written and the description of the locale brought it vividly to life. We could feel the draining heat and the dust whilst sitting in our chairs! Interesting and engaging plot and characters well drawn. We really wanted to know how it all turned out and was not disappointed. Very good. 8 out of 10.

P.D.B. (pure dead brilliant)
a 'couldn't put it down' book. packed with murders and mysteries all solved and the 'ends' tied up. even a happy ending!! the chapter on the bushfire is poignant to day (Jan 2020). I would recommend this book to others.

Thoroughly enjoyed this book - easy reading, great plot, sense of place. Reading it in February on Lewis (Scotland) I was transported to a hot draught-ridden area. Plot that twists and turns all the way through! Thoroughly recommend.

I very much enjoyed this book. The descriptions of the settings were excellent and I could imagine the heat and the drought within the town. I felt the book could have been a little shorter but having said that, there were lots of twists in the story that kept developing along the way.

A gripping crime thriller set in the Australian outback, I couldn't put down this compelling whodunnit. There were so many different strands and levels to this story, and just as you thought you were getting to grips with the mystery, there would be another twist. Most excellent!

Another gripping crime thriller from the Outback - great plot ,credible characters and keeps you guessing right to the end - possibly slightly too long but would def recommend

A tight thriller set in the arid Australian outback. A small township is rocked by mass murder by their priest and a year on a journalist arrives to review the killings. But why did he do it? There are many strands to be unravelled in this book but the solution is never obvious. More, please!

Is it our imagination, or might Australia become a new sub-genre, rather like Scandi-noir? More Australian authors seem to be having their books published in the UK and that’s great news because the ones we’ve read so far have been gripping.

Chris Hammer is an author we’d never heard of before. We read his debut novel, Scrublands, hard on the heels of The Lost Man by Jane Harper. Both are set in the Australian outback but this is really all they have in common. While The Lost Man is tightly focused on one family, Scrublands encompasses a town and is written as a more traditional crime story.

To summarise: Riversend is an outback town that’s on its knees and dying. After years of drought it hit the headlines when its parish priest shot dead five men, before he was himself killed by the police. A year later, journalist Martin Scarsden arrives to write a feature on how the town is coping. As he works to gain the trust of the townspeople and find angles for his article he realises that the accepted version of events is far from the truth.

While trying to get to the bottom of what really happened the bodies of two missing backpackers are discovered, and suddenly Scarsden finds himself in the limelight and at the centre of a new media-storm.

When it was published in Australia in 2018, Scrublands became an instant bestseller; and this year it won the UK’s Crime Writers' Association John Creasy New Blood Dagger award. The plaudits are deserved because this is a really good novel which hooks you in very quickly and doesn’t let go.

Years ago, this book would have been described as a ‘rattling good yarn’ because the pace never dawdles. The plot is as complicated as you’d expect it to be, involving numerous characters in the town as well as the local, county and state police. Even the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) is involved.

Chris Hammer has an eye for detail and atmosphere, and he manages to convey the hardship of life in an outback town, as well as the impact the drought has had on the people and the land. As Scarsden slowly unpicks the clues his investigation sometimes jumps off in unexpected directions, or is side-swiped by events, but the original shooting is, of course, ever-present in the background.

A couple of our group found the novel overlong but the rest of us enjoyed it thoroughly, getting immersed in the story and the heat! If we’re nit-picking, none of us thought the ASIO agent would have been so helpful to Scarsden; and some wished the reader was told a bit more about how the priest had got so deeply into the situation that triggered the shooting. But these comments seem churlish because none of these things spoil the story at all.

All of us agreed that our discussion of Scrublands had been skewed because we kept referring back to The Lost Man, which wasn’t fair because the two books are really very different. But undoubtedly if we’d read Scrublands first, we’d have heaped more praise on it. As it was, everyone really enjoyed Scrublands and rated it highly. The best score was 4+ Stars and the worst 3+ Stars, so do try to find a copy because it's well worth reading.

This book is set in the drought ridden Australian outback. Martin Scarsden, a journalist with a traumatic past, is sent to a small town where the peace was shattered the previous year when their priest shot dead five local residents before being shot himself by the local policeman. He was sent to report how the town had recovered from this tragedy. However, the reasons for the shootings have never been established, and the book investigates this aspect. There are a lot of twists and turns, and subplots, in this book. It is long and complicated, but it is never boring, apart from being told numerous times how hot it was!!

Stick with it - it’s worth it.

Scrublands started as a relatively slow burn and built into a gripping read with several layers of story lines and complexity within the main characters. Perhaps in common with many good books it was easy to read a chapter or two and put it down in the early stages but as it moved into the second half of the book it demanded that the reader read on ! The author skilfully built the characters with some being fairly easy to understand and others with seriously complex personality traits. Some could be identified as downright bad while the reader sensed others were basically good but had done some questionable things but with good underlying intent. How the main character worked through his own issues in pursuit of his storylines and after much turmoil ended in a better place within himself was a key element to tying the story together. The romantic element added a welcome dimension as did the happy ending for that aspect.
A thought provoking and spellbinding read.

There is nothing I like reading better than a well-written Australian thriller with all its colourful, real-life, gritty descriptions. Scrublands doesn’t disappoint. This is a story based in a fictional drought-ridden town in the outback. It is an easy page turner, with the story taking lots of twists and turns. The book begins with a rather distressing crime, but once you get past the initial chapter or two, the story opens up and leads the reader down a number of paths in the hunt for an explanation of the tragedy.

The characters are interesting and the dialogue authentic. The main character, Martin, is complex and likeable, although he wrestles with his inner demons from time to time. The description of the environment almost makes the reader feel the dust and heat and dryness of the land.

Whilst the story does have lots of subplots and requires a stretch of imagination in parts, the final wrap-up is believable and the ending ties everything together nicely.

If you are looking for a satisfying read that will keep you interested for more than 480 pages than don’t hesitate to pick up this book. It’s a crime fiction winner.