Dirt Creek by Hayley Scrivenor
Set in a small town in Australia, this story involves the disappearance of a young girl on her way home from school. Before getting to the bottom of the crime, out-of-town police officer Sarah Michaels and her partner find themselves confronting a variety of nasty secrets. Nobody is perfect, least of all, Michaels herself. Her mind keeps going back to something she did that could damage or even end her career as a police officer.
The townspeople’s nickname for Durton, Dirt Creek, says it all. For one thing, farming is the main source of income for the area. Set against a background struggle to earn a living raising crops from the earth, the writer digs up other dirt for the reader to examine.
In Durton, where everyone knows everybody else, people are unwilling to give up secrets to an outsider. In the face of resistance, Michaels must unearth a variety of unsavoury truths to find out what happened to the missing child.
Like other good contemporary mystery writing, Scrivenor’s story portrays wider social problems. Among these are the rural-urban divide, alcohol abuse, illegal drug sales, concealed rape and family violence. Many contemporary mystery writers allude to the fraught relationship between citizenry and police, much of it fuelled by amorality and sensationalism in the media. Scrivenor makes this explicit. As the detective reflects, “You could never win with the media. Police were punished when things went badly and rewarded with silence when they went well.”
The structure of the book is fresh and unusual. In addition to presenting the points of view of the protagonist and other important characters, Scrivenor has added the voice a kind of Greek chorus, through which the town’s children reveal things they’ve witnessed but kept quiet about, and even alluded to the moral implications of these secrets.
Yet the end offers some moral solace. Scrivenor has created a world where nobody is entirely innocent — a much more nuanced reality than the polarizing media tends to portray. It is also a world in which people are able to take responsibility, face their mistakes, feel the pain and move forward.