Legacy by Chris Hammer

Chris Hammer returns to the character who made him famous in Legacy, the fourth Martin Scarsden book. Legacy is different to the other Scarsden books in a number of ways. The first is that Scarsden is not on an investigation, it is more that a mystery finds him. And he shares the narrative duty with a second main character. In fact, structurally, Legacy is much closer in style to Hammer’s more recent Lucic and Buchanan books than the other Scarsedens.

Legacy opens with Martin Scarsden on the run. On the cusp of releasing a true crime book about the Australian mafia Scarsden’s book launch is bombed and he is encouraged by his security services friend to hide out in Port Paroo, a tiny outback town near the NSW/Queensland border.  Scarsden quickly finds that there has been a generations long feud between the NSW based landholders the Stantons and the Queensland based Carmichaels (Hammer calls this his version of the Hatfields and the McCoys). The acrimony was exacerbated by the shooting death of Roman Stanton by Chloe Carmichael twenty years before, after which Chloe went missing. Scarsden gets caught up in the feud against his will but then finds that not only are hitmen still after him but he has become a target of a smear campaign. At the same time Ecco, a ghostwriter with skeletons of her own, has been invited by Clay Carmichael to write a history of his property Longchamp Downs. In doing so she also gets involved in the feud but also unearths an intriguing historical mystery.

There is a lot going on in Legacy and multiple narrative strands. In the middle of this one is Hammer’s redoubtable journalist Martin Scarsden (who amusingly admits that he does not look as good as the character playing him in the in-world TV series based on his books) and a new character with her own complexities. Readers get Martin’s point of view chapters, Ecco’s point of view chapters, excerpts from Chloes’s diary and then hints of the historical mystery which is connected to the famously doomed Australian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt. All of this takes quite a bit of setting up but once the pieces start to fall into place, Hammer manages to bring it all together with plenty of drama. That said, this is not without a series of suspend-your-disbelief coincidences.

But really it is the landscape that is the winner in Legacy. While Port Paroo is not a real place, the Paroo River and the spare country around it certainly is. Hammer gives readers a feel for life in this remote part of Australia where people live on a floodplain that only floods irregularly. A number of plot points hinge on a “blue sky flood” – approaching water that flows for hundreds of kilometres across the landscape and revitalises the land (while making roads impassable for a while), making it viable for stock.

There are some cameos and call backs to previous novels and characters and while Scarsden’s past is relevant, the earlier novels are not essential reading to enjoy Legacy. After seven books it is possibly safe to say that Legacy is ‘classic’ Chris Hammer – a multi-tiered mystery set in a unique part of Australia that draws on the landscape and its history as a driver for the action.

Legacy by Chris Hammer

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8.0/10