Dust by Michael Brissenden

After trying his hand at setting his crime fiction in America (Smoke), former Australian journalist Michael Brissenden comes back home and a range of home grown issues in his new novel Dust. Set in a drying, dying community in the west of New South Wales, Brissenden uses crime fiction to take on issues of environment, renewable energy, climate protest, crime and corruption.

Dust opens with the discovery of a body on the bed of the drying Lake Heddon. That body is journalist Charles Goodman and its discovery brings two cops out from Sydney. Marten Kravets is the veteran, under a cloud following the shooting of his partner, and his younger partner Weldon immediately butt heads with Blasko, the local copper. Meanwhile, the boy who found the body, Aaron Love, is looking for his father Tobias, who went missing two years before and was presumed dead. Aaron is joined in his search by Shona, a girl who had come into his life and had also disappeared. The pair are, in turn, being hunted by Tobias, who is deep in the criminal underworld.

There are a lot of moving parts in Dust. The above does not even get to the role of Kravets’ nineteen year old daughter, or the constant background of anti-climate reporting that is stirring up the locals against renewable energy projects, even when they can look out their door and see the impact of climate change on the dried lake that used to bring tourists into town. Then there are the motorcycle gangs and politicians. Brissenden manages to keep all of these balls in the air and bring the whole together to a tense finale.

The characters and their situations are used to explore some particularly sensitive hot button issues in Australian society at the moment. But it often feels that that is what they are there for – whether it is the nineteen year old who has joined Extinction Rebellion or the former truckie using fear of government, supercharged by Covid lockdowns, to support his criminal enterprise. Brissenden has plenty to say in Dust but he can’t seem to quite leave his journalistic style and instincts behind, so while he informs the narrative sometimes feels a little forced and does not always engage.

Dust by Michael Brissenden

7.5

7.5/10