An Ill Wind

Australia’s talented stable of crime and thriller writers continues to amaze me with how they tackle the genre. Like Darryl Kerrigan from The Castle at the dinner table complimenting his wife’s rissoles: ‘Yeah, but it’s what you do with them’. Margaret Hickey’s latest offering, this time set on the Victorian plains, kicks off with a discovery of the local wind-farm operator and entrepreneur, Geordie Pritchard, hanging from the blade of a wind turbine. An imaginative way to go, don’t you think? But is it murder? Whocouldadunnit? And why? The small town of Carrabeen is deeply divided. There are those who are happy to embrace renewables and the new jobs going in the wind-farming sector, and then there are the farmers – distrustful of the technology and the loss of farming acreage. Many had already sold up after years of drought and hard labour, but for those still left in agribusiness, there’s an underlying negative sentiment. It turns out not many people like a tall poppy, and in this town there’s lots to hide.

In An Ill Wind, Hickey’s chief characters are the heavily pregnant Senior Sergeant Belinda Burney, and her bespectacled husband of the same rank, Will Lovell, who abandoned a privileged upbringing for a career in the police force serving the community. For Senior Sergeant Burney, who was brought up in Carrabeen by her single father, returning to this heavily divided community brings with it a sense of anxiety and inner turmoil.

This is a terrific novel with a great plot that reflects a lot of current issues. And gosh is it great to have two main characters with a pretty realistic workplace and recognisable personal challenges: housing affordability, job satisfaction and progression, general happiness, and that age-old question: ‘Am I good enough?’