Hermit

By S.R. White

Published by Headline https://www.headline.co.uk/

375 pages ISBN 9781472268419

Publication date 17 September 2020

I read a hardback review copy passed to me by a friend.

From the blurb

Nathan Whittler was not their usual kind of suspect.  It wasn’t, she guessed as she watched him now, simply that he was scared of being in a police station.  He wasn’t unnerved only by having been arrested next to a dead body.

It went deeper than that.

Nathan Whittler seemed terrified of people.

Synopsis

Police respond to a store’s silent alarm to find the storekeeper dead and a man beside his corpse with blood on his gloved hands.  It becomes apparent that the man simply vanished 15 years earlier, but it is not clear why he vanished, where he has been or why he has returned now of all times.  He his clearly disturbed and is not communicating.

Detective Dana Russo has taken a day’s leave, which she does on the same day each year, to face her own personal demons but is called in to lead the investigation.

The suspect can be held for 24 hours before a lawyer is automatically appointed for him, so it is a race against time for Dana.  Can she get him to open up and reveal what he knows?  To do so she will have to confront her own past but at what personal cost.

My thoughts

I can’t recall reading a crime novel set in Australia before.  I’ve never been there so my blinkered views are from the news and media in general.  I know occasionally backpackers go missing and are murdered and there have been a couple of notable serial killers in the past, but I always envisaged people were more at risk from the sharks, spiders and snakes.  Don’t Aussie cops just deal with drunken footy players as portrayed by Paul Hogan in his pre–Crocodile Dundee days?  Perhaps Antipodean Noir will become a genre; I do hope so.

The plot is simplicity itself, Dana Russo trying to get Nathan Whittler to open up and tell her (and the reader) what happened and why.  Even so it didn’t exactly move in the direction I was expecting so it’s not entirely predictable.

The bulk of the story is set within the confines of the police station which gives a sense of claustrophobia as it moves from interview room to office.  Perhaps because of this it is somewhat a slow burner as Dana winkles more information out at each interview.  If you like Dan Brown’s style of ‘this happened followed by this’ storytelling, then this is probably not for you.  The prose style at times reminded me of John le Carré in the George Smiley books, dense and not giving up secrets lightly, which made the interview scenes convincing.

The idea of using a troubled detective to gain the trust of a disturbed suspect worked well and at the plot line developed it was easy to empathise with both main characters and their underlying issues.

The concept of simply vanishing undetected for 15 years, and never coming onto people’s radar, initially seems ridiculous in the modern world were going off grid for a weekend is almost impossible, so wedded to technology we have become.  However, the author’s explanation of how it was achieved seems reasonable in such a vast continent and the motivation for doing it is credible.  This is no Homer Simpson ‘as dirty as a Frenchman’ after one day without Marge but a highly organised man with a form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder who meticulously plans his escape.  He is also intelligent.  I liked the bit where he is unhappy that the paperback, he is given to occupy him is by Zane Grey, poor Zane but not the first time he has been so maligned.

The interviews between the two main characters start to take on a confessional nature which chimes with them both having religion playing a part of their troubled past.  Zealotry in any form has to potential to poison the mind.  Dana comes to question whether by working to gain Nathan’s trust she has exploited him.

The closure of the story is both well timed and nicely worked out, albeit a bit of a surprise to me.  Whilst been a slow paced and intense read it is not overlong and demands sticking with.

The ending leaves it unclear if it will be a series or a stand-alone, though I think there is mileage in developing Dana Russo character further.  Either way I will keep an eye out for his next novel and also try and track down some more Aussie crime.