Tangled Web UK Review September 2008
Shooting Stars by
Peter Temple
hbk out July 08
Published by Quercus
at £10
Frank Calder, ex-soldier, ex-policeman, aspiring horticulturalist, is employed as a mediator. We first meet him departing from established mediation practice, about to dispense "a solid kick up the arse" to a big man with a neckbrace and a wronged wife. It’s an encounter that leaves him (and us) thinking about life, about "how the wide vista of childhood shrinks to a passage in Footscray with a man in a plastic neckbrace charging at you".
Maybe I lead a sheltered life, but this is the best opening chapter I’ve read this year. Shooting Star is Peter Temple’s fourth book and his second Ned Kelly Award winner from the Australian Crime Writer’s Association. Consistent with his desire to avoid the traps of series writing, this is his second standalone novel, though fans will note that Frank Calder shares a characteristic or two with both earlier (Jack Irish) and later (Joe Cashin) Temple protagonists: one I’ve already mentioned, another the trademark sly humour for instance.
Shortly after that terse yet philosophical opening, the at-first resisting Calder is employed by self-made millionaire property developer Pat Carson to deliver the ransom money that will bring home their kidnapped 15 year-old daughter. Calder knows better; she is in all probability already dead. Then, after a farcical first payment, Calder brings in Orlovsky, a fellow ex-Afghanistan Special Forces veteran, and spreads the net, investigative and technological - in the latter case by the use of a conveniently (and illicitly) available police database , which, stretching credulity even further, Orlovsky once worked on and knows backwards.
No matter: if credulity was the key benchmark, what proportion of crime fiction would pass muster? As ever with Temple, it's the writing that counts. Some of the material may be familiar, but Temple can always be relied on to come up with a fresh angle. That first payment for instance, delivered to the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the MCG to fans of the sport (but, sadly, hosting an Aussie riules football match), the sequence written half as it happens, then, driving tension, viewed on the ensuing televison coverage. Paramount are the people - incisive distilled portraits, character revealed as much by body language, tone of voice, distinctive dialogue as by acute observation. Amongst many, the missing girl’s schoolfriend, "closer to twenty than any fifteen-year-old should be", the hospitalised tormented mother, another perhaps luckier daughter forever scarred by her experience and, most of all, Pat Carson, the family patriarch, visibly shrinking as his dynasty crumbles.
It’s a twisting tale with at least one superbly written and devastating action sequence, the book’s not quite final revelation serving to point up Temple’s major theme - the corrosive effect of money and power. Great crime writing, bargain price. What are you waiting for?
(
Bob Cornwell
)
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