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Allen & Unwin, August 2007
Reviewed by Sally Roddom
Mystery, Young Adult
Eddie Holding lives with his family on the edge of Burruga in NSW
Australia. Burruga is a coal mining town and Eddie yearns to leave school
and start work down in the mine. His father, Albert, has returned
from WWII mentally broken. He wants Eddie and his brother Larry to rise
above the crowd. Working as a farmhand, Albert is obsessed with his sons
staying in school and refuses to let Eddie go down the mine. Larry is
happy to stay at school. He sees learning as his ticket out of town but he
spends most of his spare time getting drunk and ogling Colleen the town
beauty. In fact, most of the male population of Burruga lusts after the
beautiful Colleen, so when her body is discovered near the river one
Friday night, most of the town’s male population is under suspicion.
Sergeant Grainger narrows the suspects down, but Eddie has his own idea
who the murderer is and he tries to direct the investigation towards that
person.
It took a while for me to get use to way Stephen Herrick presented the
story. Looking at the page you would think it is going to be poetry, but
it reads like a normal novel. The format distracted me until I got use to
it. Each of the main characters takes a turn to tell the story, only a
page or so at a time. This technique has both good points and bad, the
good is that you learn more about the individual characters and can get a
better insight into what makes them tick, the bad is that as the story
cuts back and forth it breaks up the flow of the story momentarily. It is
this choppiness, despite an engrossing story, that let the whole thing
down for me.
June 2008 review originally published on Murder and
Mayhem
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