I have just finished reading this book,it was a little different from the fiction I usually read but thoroughly enjoyed it. When Jesse sees an invitation to a National Gallery exhibition in Melbourne, she notices that two of the featured landscapes are one of her father’s and one by the late Kenji Takada. The title of Takada’s is ‘Canticle Creek’, the place Adam’s body was found.

Canticle Creek by Adrian Hyland | Crime Fiction Lover

Jesse Redpath is a cop from the Territory. She helps a young Adam when he does something illegal by offering him a second chance; helping her dad and working in the local roadhouse. A week later, Adam runs away and Jesse doesn’t think about him again except to send a warrant.The mystery itself is well set up and we care for the characters. However, I did find some of the possible suspects rather two dimensional and would have liked much more depth. The same was true of the main character. She's a hard hitting woman sheriff in a male dominated environment and I loved the way she stood her own and went out on a limb investigating a crime outside her own jurisdiction (with a grumpy father in tow!). She was a character I wanted to know so much more about but I was left with only seeing the outside of her and her drastic and sometimes clever actions, rather than getting to know her from the inside out.

Canticle Creek - Kindle edition by Hyland, Adrian. Mystery

When Jesse starts to ask awkward questions, she uncovers a town full of contradictions and a cast of characters with dark pasts, secrets to hide and even more to lose. From the latest Scandinavian serial killer to Golden Age detective stories, we love our crime novels! So she leaves the Territories for Melbourne on a period of leave to investigate. Trying to find out why Daisy was killed, and by whom, brings danger to Jesse and all who are trying to help her. The final scenes where the rogue fires are threatening to engulf both evidence and investigators was just amazing.

Praise

It wasn’t until year 4 that Shane Jenek was made to feel that “people with penises should act differently from people with vaginas”. Instinctively, the young boy knew that he didn’t belong on either side of this divide. When he moved from Brisbane to Sydney in his late teens and discovered the drag-queen scene, he found a way to control the narrative of his life. For the first time since he was bullied by the alpha boys at school, he could give expression to his innate femininity while feeling powerful around straight men. Since his mainstream debut as Courtney Act on Australian Idol, Courtney has appeared on reality TV in the US and Britain and more recently on the ABC. Often funny and always frank, this memoir charts Jenek’s embrace of his gender fluidity: the process of “unbecoming who the world had told me to be” so that “I was finally able to become myself”. The witty, funny and descriptive nature of the storyline was interesting and gave way to a good imagination. I loved the characters and how the author focused more on female protagonists. Although Daisy was already dead, author makes us fall in love with a character who doesn’t even make an appearance except in prologue and in memories.