Joanna Jenkins burst onto the Australian crime fiction with her lawyer-packed debut How to Kill a Client. That book had plenty to say about corporate culture, and particularly the gender politics at play at the big end of town. In the centre of the action was Ruth Dawson, a Sydney partner transferred to Brisbane. Ruth takes centre stage again in Jenkins follow up novel The Bluff, but this one is much more down the line Australian rural crime fiction.
The Bluff opens with a disappearance and a death in the rural town of Myddle. Teenager Bea Baulderstone has gone missing and despite her mother’s fears, local policeman Gazza Parker is not particularly interested in taking on the case. Not long after this, local Dash Rogers is found shot dead at his farm gate. Before she gets to the why or the how, Jenkins drops back six months, to explore and reveal the complex web of relationships in the town and how city lawyer Ruth Dawson came to be running the local solicitor’s office, before eventually circling back to the crimes that opened the novel.
Beyond Ruth, Bea, Dash and Gazza, there is a large cast of characters in The Bluff, many of whom also get point of view chapters. Jenkins slowly builds a complex picture full of secrets and hidden agendas. But she also strategically withholds information in ways that, as the solution comes into focus, feel a little contrived.
As with her debut novel, Jenkins in interested in more than just telling a story in The Bluff. One of the key elements of The Bluff is the town’s attitude towards its Aboriginal population. From whitewashing the violent history that followed white settlement of the area, to the treatment of young Aboriginal men by the police, Jenkins documents both institutional and casual racism that continues to persist. At the same time there is also story of conservation, development pressures and some of the hypocrisy of the wellness industry (a popular and fairly easy target these days).
Overall, The Bluff is an engaging piece of Australian rural crime fiction. Although it has a large cast, Ruth Dawson is a likeable central character to anchor the book around, and handy when you need someone to solve a crime. But given the amount of rural Australian crime, The Bluff, while enjoyable, fails to stand out after the more unique and interesting setting of How to Kill A Client.
The Bluff by Joanna Jenkins
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