Pile by the Bed reviews Chris Hammer’s The Tilt – bringing back characters from his last book Treasure and Dirt to investigate a series of old and new crimes in a town on the Murray River border of NSW and Victoria.

Pile by the Bed reviews Treasure and Dirt, the new crime novel by Chris Hammer focusing on new main characters and set in a remote opal mining town.

Pile by the Bed reviews Trust by Chris Hammer – the third book in his series featuring journalist Martin Scarsden, set in a windy, corrupt Sydney.

Pile by the Bed reviews Silver by Chris Hammer, Martin Scarsdale #2, sequel to Scrublands.

Rural seems to be the new black in Australian crime fiction. Far from the gritty Melbourne backstreets or white collar crime of Sydney. And rural crime is definitely getting some recognition. From books like Jane Harper’s multi-award winning The Dry and Garry Disher’s Bitterwash Road through to two of this year’s Ned Kelly Award Best First Crime shortlist nominees – Wimmera and The Dark Lake. Into the fray comes Chris Hammer’s first fiction outing Scrublands, much like The Dry, a book that announces itself by its title as reflecting a part of Australia that most Australians have never seen but would like to feel a connection to. And Hammer has the chops – a long time journalist, he has set his debut fiction outing during a lengthy drought in southeastern Australia, a milieu that he investigated in his non-fiction first book The River. Scrublands opens with a shocking crime. One Sunday morning, out of the blue, the local priest in the small Riverina town of Riversend opens up with a rifle and kills five of his parishioners before himself being killed by the local policeman. Rumours of child sexual abuse lead to the crime being written off by the world as “perverted…