Hot Ground is Western Australian crime writer Lisa Ellery’s follow up to her legal thriller debut Private Prosecution. Hot Ground follows one of the characters from that first book – detective Jessy Parkin – out to Kalgoorlie where she is serving a form of penance for her involvement in the previous book. The consequences of Private Prosecution will continue to hound Jessy behind the scenes, as will her former boyfriend Andrew, the lawyer protagonist of the previous book. But Hot Ground is a much more straight forward procedural than Ellery’s debut, getting deep into police procedure and, more interestingly, the complex field of gold prospecting.
Hot Ground opens with a death and a disappearance. The cold open describes the death of a seventy year old woman just called “the landlady” and will only become relevant much later in the story. The main story revolves around the disappearance of gold prospector Max Cochrane. Max’s daughter Mia is convinced that something has happened as he spent a lot of his time in remote areas, was always well prepared and stayed in contact. Detective Jessy Parkin is asked to help out and very soon finds out the situation is much more complicated than a missing prospector. A couple of ambiguous alternate point of view chapters (titled “The cowboy” and “The director”) clue readers into these complications but, again, take a long time to come into focus.
Much like Andrew Deacon, Ellery’s main character from Private Prosecution, Jessy is a rounded character who makes mistakes but owns them and is well aware of her flaws. She is also a dogged and intuitive investigator, loyal to the colleagues who have her back (and disdainful of those who don’t) and unflappable in the face of some fairly stressful situations. While she is keen to get back to Perth, Jessy is a Kalgoorlie local (much like her creator), and so is a great guide to what is a fascinating and fairly remote part of the country and its colourful history.
Hot Ground does not shy away from the legal and corporate technicalities of the gold prospecting game. This includes the set-up which sees Max heading out to film himself knocking a stake in the ground at the stroke of midnight to literally “stake a claim” on a potential mining site before anyone else. Ellery also goes into the corporate machinations involved in this potentially lucrative business. Much in the way Barry Maitland often does in his Brock and Kolla mysteries, Ellery uses the form to demystify a fairly technical area in a way that makes enough sense to the reader and elevate this above the ordinary rural procedural.
Ellery cleverly builds on the events of Private Prosecution without being at all repetitive. She builds out not only her main character but also some of the returning minor characters from that book. And she uses an engaging procedural to paint a picture of a place and community and draw readers into their complex world.
Hot Ground by Lisa Ellery
No Comments
Comments are closed.