General News
15 June, 2024
Mystery in the Mallee scrub
Miles from the nearest track, a body has been dumped – and not just any body, but that of a high-profile, inner-city property developer, dressed more for a smart restaurant dinner than for a bush-bashing hike through an expanse of Mallee scrub.
When Melbourne homicide detective André Marshall and Age journalist Ella Ritchie literally bump into the corpse of Portia Meredith while training for an endurance run, it’s immediately clear that she didn’t walk herself into the heart of the Big Desert’s protected landscape.
So how did she get there?
The couple quickly realise that only one explanation properly fits the evidence: Portia must have been dropped - either heavily drugged or already dead - from a low-flying light plane.
But as Ella takes charge of the story for her paper and André convinces his boss back in the big smoke to accept the case, the couple start to uncover twists and turns that lead nowhere concrete.
Despite being involved in an office affair with a colleague, Portia’s husband seems to be in the clear – he had already been on the other side of the world on business for several days when she was reported missing.
A real estate transaction gone wrong, perhaps?
Tension with an employee within the Merediths’ company?
Someone must have had reason to dispose of the apparently well-liked woman in a dramatically unconventional way.
In his fourth crime novel situated in regional Victoria and the first to introduce André and Ella as key characters, Bendigo author Colin King sets the action against the real-life backdrop of Wyperfeld National Park, Lake Albacutya and Rainbow, where Ella’s ancestors have been farming for generations.
It’s close enough to his hometown of Horsham for the former project manager to know the countryside intimately.
“The Mallee wilderness is an area I’ve long been fond of,” King says.
“I grew up in the Wimmera and was drawn to nearby wilderness areas as soon as I could drive.
“The Big Desert, Little Desert and Grampians are all places I’d spend time trekking and camping.”
However, his latest novel was relatively slow to gestate, taking the better part of two decades to emerge from his imagination.
“The seed of Wire and Bone arose in the 2000s when I regularly drove to Mildura through thick Mallee scrub along the Calder Highway,” King said.
“On the car radio I’d hear news about badly hidden bodies that kept turning up.
“With murderers making such a meal of things, it occurred to me that all they needed to do was drive up here and drag the body 50 metres into the scrub.
“This is where a writer’s mind can wander on a lonely four-hour roadtrip.
“Anyway, when I got around to writing a Mallee murder mystery I decided to drop the body from an aeroplane so it would end up in the absolute centre of nowhere.
“Then I set about solving the case, which is the part I enjoy most.”
In fact, King not only delivers a fitting finale to André and Ella’s joint investigation but takes his readers on a highly believable journey through family dynamics, farm succession and small-town interconnectedness.
Wire and Bone - which takes its name from the opening track on local band The Lazy Farmers Sons’ album "Small Sky" - is an engaging, fast-paced, comfortable weekend read in the style of Ann Cleeves’ phenomenally successful Shetland series.
King introduced his new release in person at Rainbow Library on Friday.
Wire and Bone has a recommended retail price of $28.95 in its paperback edition.
It is also available for Kindle, at $9.99.