Black River arrived wrapped in black plastic with a yellow rose attached, a somewhat creepy publicity ploy echoing the modus operandi of the Blue Moon Killer who haunts its pages. Operating in western Sydney, the BMK has already struck twice and Strike Force Satyr is well into their investigation when a third body is found in the grounds of the prestigious (fictional) Prince Albert College in western Sydney.
This is the scenario for a gripping police procedural by former journalist and private-school alumnus Matthew Spencer, who draws from his own experience to follow the case from two perspectives. There’s that of the police, including the no-nonsense green-eyed Detective Sergeant Rose Riley, and there’s that of journalist Adam Bowman, the son of a former teacher at Prince Albert, which he also attended as a boy. And it’s no ordinary school either, as Bowman wryly observes, it’s “patrician, blazered and slap-bang in the centre of the western sprawl”.
Matthew Spencer’s novel is imbued with an acute sense of Sydney.Credit:
Bowman’s a likeable, solitary chap weighed down by a predictable penchant for alcohol and a family tragedy. So when his editor at The National (the only remaining broadsheet in Australia) asks for some background to the most recent gruesome discovery at the school, he not only knows his way around the 160-hectare site and the waterway that threads through it, but also its complex history. As Bowman walks the creek on the campus, he recalls how his father told him about the First Fleet party that made it to the headwaters of the Parramatta, “eating lorikeet and crow soup”. And it’s this experience of place that gives Black River both its resonance and its depth.
It’s also a book that cries out for a map (I read it with Google Maps open) as the action shifts from the “smug bars and cafes” of Surry Hills, where Bowman works, to Balmain where he lives, while casting a caustic glance sidewards at the glass casino in Barangaroo “pilfering the sky”. While other people might look to the east, to the harbour and the big bays, Bowman prefers to look west, to the scars of industry and the way the light plays on “the shimmering scales of the serpent river” that appears to connect the three crimes.
Black River by Matthew Spencer.
There are also some bitter reflections on the state of newspaper journalism today as Bowman contemplates The National’s cavernous newsfloor with its graveyard of empty desks and filing cabinets documenting a lost era. All that’s left, he reflects, are the kids on the website, “the odd boomer columnist bravely braying on and a calcified seam of middle-aged time servers”. Ouch. And Bowman, of course, doing his best in trying circumstances.
As the investigation proceeds, Bowman and Riley form a strategic alliance that enables the police to use Bowman’s newspaper reports to try to provoke the BMK into revealing themselves, while Bowman uses his advantage with the police to break the story ahead of his rivals. The relationship between the two is nicely done, avoiding cliched expectations and taking some unexpected detours.
Black River is a fine read, breathing new life into the urban police procedural and the predictability of the serial killer thriller while offering trenchant observations about people and place that ring infallibly true. Such is the power of good crime fiction.
Black River by Matthew Spencer is published by Allen & Unwin, $32.99.
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