Burning Mountain by Darcy Tindale

Darcy Tindale was shortlisted in the Ned Kelly Awards for her debut novel The Fall Between, a book which introduced readers to detective Rebecca Giles. In that first book, Giles had relocated from Sydney to Muswellbrook, in the upper Hunter Valley, to look after her ageing father, also a former policeman, but also to uncover some family secrets. The sequel, Burning Mountain, finds Giles involved in a cold case which reaches back into her childhood.

Giles is called back from leave when a skull is found on nearby Mount Wingen. Before long it is suspected that the skull (and nearby remains) belong to Oliver Lavine, a teenager who went missing eighteen years before while on a hike in the area with four friends. The Lavine disappearance was one of her father’s cases and he had always suspected their neighbour, a horse-riding teacher who was also suspected of being a paedophile but her father could not find the evidence. Oliver’s four companions from that day are still in town and at least two of them are planning a little more criminal activity of their own. While in another story thread, local Amy Thicket and her ten-year-old son Joe are trying to manage with Amy’s violent, abusive husband. All of these stories will collide as the investigation proceeds.

Rebecca Giles once again is a realistically messy but effective investigator. Her relationship with her father is well observed, and once again the investigation allows her to see her own past in a new light. But as with The Fall Between, Tindale is interested in a broader range of characters, and Burning Mountain has a number of interesting, if extremely flawed, side characters.

Australian cold case crime stories about missing teenage bushwalkers have become a little common place recently. This premise allows for an exploration of the toxic nature of teenage friendships and the impact of long held secrets coming to light. Just this year we have had Christian White’s The Ledge and Bronwyn Rivers’ The Reunion which both used a similar premise. While these books share some DNA with Burning Mountain, all three take different approaches to dealing with their subject matter. Tindale’s approach is a more down-the-line procedural but she deepens and complicates her tale by layering on a couple of additional present day subplots, one a Tarantino-esque plot by a pair of half-baked criminals (who also happen to be suspects in the original crime) and the other of domestic violence.

Burning Mountain is a solid follow up to The Fall Between. Tindale uses the landscape well (Mount Wingen is a real place in the Hunter Valley where an underground coal seam has been burning for thousands of years) and the narrative ranges over a diverse cast of idiosyncratic local characters. What also stands out here is the number of threads that Tindale sets up and then brings together for a tense finale.

Burning Mountain by Darcy Tindale

7.5

7.5/10