Cold River by Margaret Hickey

Margaret Hickey returns to the Victorian high country in Cold River, a sequel to her Ned Kelly Award winning novel The Creeper. Senior Constable Sally White is back in action, breaking the rules and dealing with her complicated family structure as she hunts for a missing hiker.

Cold River’s cold open involves hiker Louis Taylor, unable to climb a cliff that he has fallen down and trying to decide whether to jump into the raging river below him. Then Hickey returns to Sally, back from a South Pacific holiday and feeling a little guilty for being away from work. Sally quickly gets drawn into the search for Louis which has now been ongoing for a while. The search is given new life when Louis’s backpack is discovered but Sally thinks there is something odd about where it was found and starts to dig further. Which is when she stumbles on a gangland murder and finds out about another missing person from a few years before. Soon Sally is trying and make connections between these cases. But there are forces that do not want her investigating.

The plot of Cold River revolves around illegal, untaxed tobacco which has the nickname ‘chop-chop’. The supply coming out of the Victorian high country was very lucrative in the 1990s and seems to be resurging. Sally finds that Louis was investigating the trade but that it possibly has ties both to the police and to some of the well-established and tight-knit local families in the area, making her investigation doubly fraught.

 Sally’s investigation is fairly methodical and slow moving. So Hickey ups the tension by also including point-of-view chapters from Louis who finds himself in increasing amounts of trouble. Louis is decidedly not a hero (and knows it) but probably best represents plenty of normal people if they were caught up in a threatening or violent situation.

It was always clear from The Creeper that there was more to Sally’s story that needed to be told. Her father is a criminal and her stepfather is the deputy police commissioner. Sally’s mother is divorced from both of them but also maintains a good relationship with both, something Sally has trouble doing, at least with her biological father. Being regional crime, Sally runs the one-person station at Edenville and is still trying to be accepted by the community (a task made harder since she broke up with her local boyfriend). And she does like to have a good time and drink too much, which is something that still tends to get her into trouble. But she is also an intuitive investigator who will keep pushing for the truth even when plenty of people are warning her off it and will put her life on the line if she needs to.

Hickey, once again, brings the landscapes and people of the Victorian high country to life. The rugged peaks and the people who hike them, the freezing rivers and the people who swim in them year round, the dangerous roads that wind around the mountains and the small towns and landholdings. While there is plenty of Australian rural crime, Hickey has always shown a deep understanding of regional communities and the way they operate. This is one of her many observations (through Sally):

Without people like Dom and Barbara, the whole system might collapse, she thought. There’d be no CFA, no SES, no Park Run. There’d be no Meals on Wheels, no op-shop staff and no local sport. Volunteers are the keystone to every community that ever existed. Without them, rural life would simply falter, then fall.

While Edenville and its local mountain are fictional, Hickey does locate her action in the Victorian alps and includes real places including Mount Viking and a very real isolated location to which one of her characters goes hiking called Forlorn Hope. The other aspect of crime novels set in regional Victoria is that Melbourne is never more than a few hours drive away and so Sally also gets to spend a little time in the city.

Hickey is one of a few Australian crime writers who are setting their stories in the Victorian high country at the moment. While they have different styles, this series is very similar to Adrian Hyland’s three Jesse Redpath books (which started with Canticle Creek). Both feature strong but flawed female police officers struggling to connect to their communities but who go above and beyond. The area is more than big enough and interesting enough for both of them.

Cold River by Margaret Hickey

8.5

8.5/10