Brett Evans

The suspension of disbelief is a necessary thing when reading a book.

But

There comes a point where a plot in a thriller, in a crime novel, has to click in neatly like an old watch, you know, and I don't know if he pulls that off, but we'll maybe keep that for a bit later.

Well, yeah.

Okay, it's rural crime.

He certainly gets rural life really good.

There's a lot of nice writing about relationships with his friends and his dead parents and his family and his ex-wife.

And he talks about farming and nature in a really nice way.

So, yeah, he's very good at that.

No.

Yeah, rural crime.

Down these mean dirt tracks, a farmer must walk who is himself not mean, to paraphrase Raymond Chandler.

That's right.

There are a lot of phone calls actually in this story.

Oh, well, there goes that theory.

But yeah, it is part of a growing genre.

I mean, besides Scrubland and The Dry, which are both big bestsellers.

The Broken Shore, Peter Temple's book, was probably the precursor of all of this.

Yeah, Jasper Jones.

Yeah.