Haze by Sam Elliott

Australian crime writers are becoming a little obsessed with fire. There are obviously a good reasons for this as every summer the continent lights up and the communities most under threat are smaller rural and regional locations. This allows for narratives that mix rural crime with an additional threat. So it is no surprise that Sam Elliott’s debut Haze, much like James Delargy’s recent novel Into the Flames, opens with a murder (a double murder in this case) discovered during an evacuation caused by a massive bushfire.

As Haze opens a major bushfire threatens the small coastal community of Broughlet. Constable Dahlia Turner has been charged with making sure local properties have been evacuated in the face of an oncoming fire. Her last stop is that of her best friends – couple Callum and Xavier. She finds the pair dead and their nine-year-old son Jude missing. She quickly decides Jude has been abducted rather than just run away (how she reaches that conclusion is more than a little tenuous). Turner is soon on a mission to find Jude, but in order to do so she has to confront the town’s two opposing forces – a cult called The People’s Cleansing Light (which she was a part of as a child and who have an obsession with fire as a cleansing force), and a local developer and his band of ne’er-do-well sons (who still blame Turner for the death of their brother).

As can be seen from this summary, Turner has too many connections to every element of the case of the missing boy and yet… she is paired up with Fowler, an out-of-town detective, to try and solve it. Community tensions mount as the threat of those fires increases and both sides blame the other for starting them. In amongst this, Turner and Fowler start to understand that Jude is possibly not the first child to go missing from the town and the stakes of their investigation increase.

There is a lot going on in Haze, all of it centred around Dahlia Turner. She has a dark, personal connections to all of the main players and suspects and is herself a little out of control due to her concern for Jude. This is on top of the fact that even before this series of events she was often shunned, suspected and verbally abused by her fellow townsfolk due to her former connection with the People’s Cleansing Light. This gives the narrative a frenetic pacing but might make readers wonder why she came back to the town at all.

A fair amount of suspension of disbelief is required to make Haze work, particularly the ultimate solution to the overarching mystery. But in this regard the pacing helps. Haze starts frenetically and event piles on event so quickly that invested readers will keep turning the pages. This is a confident debut and Turner can be a compelling and dogged, if sometimes frustrating protagonist. Elliott leaves some elements of Turner’s backstory a little vague but those who are interested are likely to learn more about her in the already announced sequel (Deepfake) expected next year.

Haze by Sam Elliott

7

7.0/10