Unbury the Dead by Fiona Hardy

Bonny and Clyde, Thelma and Louise, Cagney and Lacey. Fiona Hardy, crime fiction afficionado known for her award-winning books for kids, delivers her own female crime fiction duo in her debut crime novel for adults – Unbury the Dead.

Unbury the Dead introduces readers to Alice and Teddy as they take a well-earned break after doing a bit of standover work for their boss Choker. But that break is cut short when each is offered a separate job. Alice is tasked with secretly driving the body of dead millionaire Darwin Weiss through the countryside before delivering the body to the family home for burial. While Teddy is sent to try and find Cole, a missing teenager, who very few people seem to care about. Neither task will be easy or resolve in the way the pair expect, setting up a very different second half and denouement.

Alice and Teddy are definitely criminals but they live in the grey and have a strong sense of both justice and what they need for their own survival. They are tough, but not without feelings, and there is care in the way Hardy shows them navigating their work and the impact that it has on their personal lives. The first half of the novel is firmly rooted in their individual points of view and effectively develops their friendship and relationships. The second half is a little more freewheeling as the pair try to unravel the mysteries that they uncovered without running foul of either their boss or other parts of the Melbourne criminal underworld.

The real trick of this book is that Hardy makes it easy to cheer for Alice and Teddy even when they are clearly doing bad things. In this respect Unbury the Dead follows in a tradition of Australian crime writing with criminal anti-heroes in the lead. Best known for this is Garry Disher’s gentleman thief Wyatt but Unbury the Dead probably has more in common with Disher’s more recent book Sanctuary which features a lone female thief trying to stay off the radar. Other Australian writers who have recently found success focussing on the characters from the darker side are Lorraine Peck (whose debut The Second Brother won a Ned Kelly Award) and to some extent Shelley Burr’s debut Wake (also a Ned Kelly Award Winner).

Unbury the Dead is an Australian crime novel that, refreshingly, does not set its action in a small Australian rural community or follow the beats of a classic police procedural. The mysteries are slowly developed in the first half of the book and set up well to unspool in surprising (although not entirely unpredictable) ways in the second. Hardy has delivered a winning pair of leads in Alice and Teddy, combining two long traditions of Australian anti-hero characters but also female crime duos. And given the complexity that Hardy has developed in these characters and their milieu, it would not be surprising if we see this pair in action again.

Unbury the Dead by Fiona Hardy

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8.0/10