Project Status Report: 5th November 2025

Senior Constable Paul Hirschhausen and his small community are once again put to the test in the fifth of this outstanding rural noir series.

Paul Hirsch is out and about on his huge, drought-ridden South Australian beat doing firearms audits. Checking that guns are stored properly, the ammunition kept separate, not lying around on the back seats of utes as occasionally happens, and definitely not missing. A mandatory duty that always involves a lot of tea, slightly stale biscuits (the ones put away for ‘good’), and welfare checks. People out here are doing it tough – the drought is one of the worst ever, livestock are being culled in huge numbers, and everyone’s at their limits just trying to hang on. Not that Hirsch is expecting a lot of problems, it’s more welfare checks than anything else. Which is why he should have known something was up with Al Stanyer.

Hirsch brooded as he headed back the way he’d come. He could’ve stayed longer with the guy. What a life: far from the nearest town, shitty internet, bugger-all mobile phone reception. No bus at the end of anyone’s driveway out here, let alone a bank, doctor or dentist less than an hour away. If someone like Alastair Stanyer fell off a ladder or suffered from some other chronic painful or life-threatening condition, he might wait eight or twelve weeks to get an appointment.

Hirsch is a good rural cop, even if he ended up out here as punishment. He’s concerned about the people on his patch, a natural observer, and patient. Good at keeping in touch, being supportive, he knows when silence is needed. That’s not to say he’s a pushover, though, and he’s not convinced by his boss’s go-easy approach when one of the local no-hopers turned sovereign citizen starts throwing punches and pushing his luck.

He climbed to his feet, shrugged off offers of help and trudged, half-bent over, back to the police station. Got behind the wheel and called Sergeant Brandl as he set off sedately after yet another of the pissant small-town outlaws that were the bane of his existence.

Nothing is as simple as the search for Trent McRae, a man who thinks throwing punches at cops is fine, that the government and its agencies are illegitimate, that number plates are part of the conspiracy (although his suspect ute is fully registered and owned by his mum), and is a dab hand at all the crackpot ideas these people spout. He is deeply embedded in a couple of local fringe groups that seem to spend a lot of time and effort sending out threatening missives and standing around shouting pointless abuse at bank officials repossessing local farms. There are also the more dangerous aspects – violence and attacks on Hirsch are increasing, and weapons caches start appearing. Meanwhile, there’s illegal rubbish dumping, targeted road rage, and the council and its mayor making themselves desperately unpopular with everyone – not just the SovCitz bunch. Then an old accidental death / missing persons case has to be revisited as worrying connections and evidence are revealed.

There has been a steady increase in local crime fiction that addresses the sovereign citizen movement, although nothing quite like Mischance Creek. Disher, as always, is master of the art of misdirection, complicated scenarios made easy, and the slow, measured build. His deceptively laid-back storytelling style is enough to draw the reader into the action without ever making it seem obvious there’s something really big building here.

Hirsch followed Erica Woodhead back to her mother-in-law’s house, learned that Audrey McRae knew nothing about any shotgun, said goodbye to Sergeant Brandl and returned to Tiverton feeling crabbed and carping, full of gaps and absences.

The search for the now missing Trent McRae and Alastair Stanyer goes hand in hand with the firearms audit, the rubbish dumping and other more day-to-day policing tasks, alongside the personal – ongoing grief over the death of Hirsch’s father and his mother’s struggles to adjust. Then the discovery of a long-dead body, and the mystery of a dog found on the road, seem to be the tipping point. And as always, there are the little gems of observation that just nail Hirsch’s life in rural Australia, which also might hint at what’s to come.

He tossed his empty cup before shouldering through the hall’s heavy main doors. Into a warren of meeting rooms at the rear, and finally into a room normally reserved for the Country Women’s Association. Charles III reigned here, on the main wall – with his mother on a side wall, as if reluctant to cede him the throne.

Out on the edges, in communities where everything has been stripped away due to drought and years of government neglect, it’s easy and convenient to blame the fringe dwellers who latch onto a version of belonging that doesn’t fit conventional standards. But we are currently watching the playbook rolled out worldwide: the conmen, grifters, control freaks and evil people who get into communities and work them for their own ends. Be it influence or numbers, it probably comes down to distraction – when the zone is flooded with epic levels of noise, it’s hard to maintain focus on the main game – the corruption, the illegalities, the money and power grabs.

In the Hirsch series, Disher has always given voice to those who live a difficult, and different lifestyle. Battlers and the lost, people proud of where they come from, and desperate to maintain that connection into the future. The dodgy, the downright awful and the profoundly decent people who live in areas away from the cities and services. Those that thrive in that world, and those that hang on by the skin of their teeth. In Mischance Creek he’s also drawing out an explanation for why fringe dwellers are drawn to fringe ideals, and how easy those communities are to manipulate. Giving the reader something very different to consider when looking to explain or blame.

In 2018 a novel barnstormed its way into the Ngaio Marsh Awards with THE SOUND OF HER VOICE making it to double finalist in both the Best First and Best Novel categories. At the time I remember thinking this is an author with such potential, and knowing it was a pseudonym, stood by patiently waiting to see if the author would be able to emerge, or would continue to write under that name. Chris Blake is that author, and his second novel, SOFTLY CALLS THE DEVIL is as good as that debut, continuing on with the intense, unsparing, and oh so realistic stylings of the first offering.

Following on with Matt Buchanan's career and personal story, for some context, from my review of the first book:

Every year the Ngaio Marsh awards for New Zealand crime fiction throw up an unexpected perspective, something brave and unusual that will set you back on your heels and make you think. For this reviewer, this year, that book was THE SOUND OF HER VOICE. In what's a combination of police procedural, and tragic police perspective, Detective Matt Buchanan has been in the job too long, and he's had a gut full of the nastiness of human nature. Unsolved murder cases haunt him, people being bastards haunt him, everything haunts him. He's bitter and he's well on the way to being twisted, and the murder of 14 year old Samantha Coates puts him on the trail of something big, and even nastier than he had even thought possible.

This second outing for Buchanan sees him back in uniform, in a small town, doing typical small town policing. And he's more settled, seemingly happier in himself, and what might seem like a demotion to some, is a chance to regroup, and rethink life and career, although the quieter world of traffic offences, kids behaving badly and the odd drug dealer, suddenly gets blown apart when his much admired predecessor in the job, Gus, is discovered beside a river with a bullet in his head. Gus had been doing a bit of digging around in an old murder-suicide in the local area, the parent's bodies discovered but their daughter never found. For all the world it looked like a violent and controlling father had inevitably flipped, and the missing daughter had always been assumed dead, as there had never been a trace of her. Matt's detective spider senses are tweaked though, and as much as he doesn't want to think it, it seems that there's been some rifts in this seemingly close-knit community, until more murders push him firmly back into his old detecting ways.

Refreshingly this novel doesn't make out that all the higher-ups and/or colleagues are idiots, and Buchanan isn't set up to be a lone wolf that saves the day. Rather the effects of his own trauma, and loss, are incorporated into the story of a decent bloke, trying to do the right thing, by a community of people he feels responsible for. He's also able to make some forward movement in his personal life, which very nearly doesn't work out, something that was surprisingly moving. 

SOFTLY CALLS THE DEVIL is one of those crime novels that, on the face of it, is a standard police procedural, written by somebody who knows that world back to front (Blake runs the Behavioural Science unit of the NZ Police in Wellington). He's also incredibly skilled at making it all about the story, not the process, and at no stage does this read like a training manual, or a self-help treatise.

Instead, this is a fast paced, nicely twisty mystery with a particularly nasty killer at the centre of it - killing to protect themselves from their past, as is so often the way. There is also something very real about the way this story addresses the complications and trauma of an ongoing policing career, and how the connections with other serving officers who understand, and a community that supports and sympathises can be the difference between burn out and thriving.

Told in a brisk, no nonsense tone that is richly interlaced with laconic humour, and compelling observation, SOFTLY CALLS THE DEVIL delivers and then some on the promise of THE SOUND OF HER VOICE. Bring on the third novel please. 

The sixth novel now in the Fiji Islands Mystery series, DEATH OF A DIPLOMAT has a lot of twists and turns in the personal sides of the lives of DI Joe Horseman and his team. Because of that you really would be best to dip into the series a tad earlier than this one, just to get a taste for the day to day life of a Fijian Police DI, and the sorts of cases that he and his team have to deal with. To say nothing of an unsupportive, mildly bats boss, and Horseman's beloved Junior Shiners rugby team.

Rugby looms largish in these storylines as Horseman was a very famous Fijian rugby player before injury put pay to that career and saw him return to the islands, taking up a career in the police force. I say largish in that his fame is a way into a lot of situations, but the "rugby" talk itself is mostly confined to the recognition and accolades heaped on Horseman by the people he encounters. He is also supported by a close and hardworking team of police colleagues, and a close relationship with many people who form the periphery of lots of his investigations.

It is one of those series that has been building a world in which it inhabits, and the sense of place, and culture is strong in these. The food descriptions are all too frequently mouth watering, the locations for some of the cases glorious, and the culture, and way of the people shines through. There is a bit of Fijian language dotted throughout the dialogue (with a glossary helpfully included), but there is never anything that can't be sussed from the context, and somehow those greetings, and exclamations make the feel of the novels even more authentic.

This time around there's a weaving in of Horseman's extracurricular activities - a rugby team made up of street kids in dire need of support and guidance - and the untimely murder of the Australian High Commissioner to Fiji, Her Excellency Helen Armstrong, who was immediately noticed as missing when she didn't arrive to open a hostel built for the street kids with her assistance. This makes Horseman's investigation doubly personal, not only did he know this victim, he admired her and he would always be grateful for her support to help his beloved Shiner kids (many of whom earn a paltry living on the streets, shining shoes for people). (There is an amusing aside about the number of homeless shoeshine boys in a country where most people wear sandals at the most...)

The resolution of the case, as is often the way with this series, comes down to excellent forensic work, dogged ticking off of investigative points, and a sixth sense about what is and isn't right about all of this. (And a lot of tea drinking!) There's also a subthread here on the smuggling of drugs which serves as a great way to bring team member, now promoted and working on another island, Susila Singh back into the action, and into the world of favourite coffee shops, food and the team.

I've been a fan of this series since the early novels and it's always improved with each new book. DEATH OF A DIPLOMAT is a complex investigation, combining the complications of dealing with diplomatic restrictions and relationships between countries, but always pulling everything back to the lowest common denominator. What people do when they believe they have no choice. On the other hand, it looks like Horseman and Singh have some big decisions to make - some of which they do, some of which make you wonder what next.

Can't remember quite how this novel piqued my interest, but I do love whimsical, gentle Japanese crime fiction and the library had a copy so...

First up, this was a fabulous read, full of whimsy and gentle humour, with a fantabulous setup: a library that only opens after dark, never allows patrons to check books out, and consists entirely of the collections of books that were once owned by now deceased Japanese authors. 

The employees are also an eclectic set of people - former booksellers and librarians who have had rocky past careers, all of whom have come to work in the library after an approach from the mysterious and anonymous owner of this magnificent building. Most employees have also been given accommodation in a nearby set of small apartments, and it's between their home lives in such close proximity, and such an odd, enclosed working environment, where even the meals provided by a small onsite cafe and an eccentric chef, are related to well known books, that everyone is given a chance to come to terms with what they do, and who they are.

The Night Library is part museum, part collection library, with patrons who pay to come and sit with the books, a security guard, a manager, and a very different little set of employees, all of whom are not just grateful for the job, but come to be quite passionate, or they find a pathway to something else.

Whilst this is mostly a story about people, and life circumstances, there are also a couple of minor mysteries dotted throughout the story - the biggest of which is the identity of the anonymous, and seemingly infinitely wealthy owner of the complex, one of the smaller ones being the discovery of many books that don't belong to any of the collections, which causes great consternation. At the centre of the tale is a very new employee, Otoha Higuchi, and given the story is about her coming to terms with the job, and the environment, it's a journey of discovery for the character, and the reader. The moral of the tale appears to be that you must do what you love, and seek out the things that bring you joy, what you really want to do with your life, regardless of what other people think.

Or it could be something completely different - the joy of novels like this one is that you're free to immerse yourself in this strange little world and come out the other end thoroughly beguiled, or utterly confused.