The urgency of the plot picks up in the second half - and goes off in unexpected directions. Temple also interweaves some interesting political and racial problems into the storyline without resorting to cliche, although the picture he paints of rural Australia (and its police force) isn’t exactly the one that the tourist brochures will want you to see. You get a real feel for the man: his decency, his pain, his professionalism and his solitary nature. I enjoyed the slow sense of build-up, the careful exploration of Cashin’s current life interspersed with the occasional flashback of his troubled past. But this is not a bad thing, because you get a real sense of what makes Joe Cashin - and the rural community in which he lives - tick. The first half is very heavy on scene setting and character development and there’s little in the way of detective work. Temple, who was born in South Africa, is the first Australian to win the award.īut while it might have scored a top-class prize for crime writing, I’m not entirely convinced that this book is a conventional crime novel. Since my reading of The Broken Shore, it has been awarded the Duncan Lawrie Dagger (formerly the CWA Gold Dagger for Fiction) for 2007.
Well, two months later I’m finally composing this review-of-sorts. I then gave the book to my father, who was about to embark on a long haul trip back to Australia, and kept telling myself I’d write about it … soon. And because I couldn’t quite work out what it was about the book that I loved so much I couldn’t muster the creative energy to write a review. The book was absolutely enthralling in a way I could not put my finger on.
I picked up a cheap copy from Waterstone’s earlier in the year and read it over the course of a dismal weekend in June. But then I heard lots of good things, mainly from British critics, about Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore and knew it was a book I had to track down. Fiction – paperback Quercus 400 pages 2007.Ĭrime novels set in modern day Australia are few and far between.
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