And Fire Came Down by Emma Viskic

Publisher's Synopsis

Caleb Zelic can’t hear you. But he can see everything.

The pulsating follow-up thriller to the acclaimed Resurrection Bay.

Caleb Zelic used to meet life head-on. Now he’s struggling just to get through the day. His best mate is dead, his ex-wife, Kat, is avoiding him, and nightmares haunt his waking hours.

But when a young woman is killed after pleading for his help in sign language, Caleb is determined to find out who she was. And the trail leads straight to his hometown, Resurrection Bay. The town is on bushfire alert and simmering with racial tensions.

As he delves deeper, Caleb uncovers secrets that could threaten his life and any chance of reuniting with Kat. Driven by his demons, he pushes on. But who is he willing to sacrifice along the way?

My Review 

In And Fire Came Down, Emma Viskic returns us to the characters and location that helped make Resurrection Bay such an absorbing thriller.

Caleb Zelic is profoundly deaf yet has proven to be a more than capable private investigator. His instincts are highly tuned and his determined nature means that he is like a dog with a bone when it comes to following the slightest of leads.

The story begins in Melbourne when Caleb is approached in the street by a random guy who hands him a note telling him there is a girl in the alley who needs to speak with him. When he approaches it becomes clear that she already knows he is deaf because she attempts to sign to him in Auslan.

Before he can get a clear idea of what she is trying to tell him she is set upon by a large man. Caleb fights the man off and the woman runs off but happens to flee into the path of a car. She dies in Caleb’s arms and it is in watching her life leave her eyes that haunts him to the point of finding out who she is and why she was in such fear for her life.

He is left with the written message, the contents of which means little to him but he notices that it has been written on a ticket from Resurrection Bay. His home town.

So it’s back to Resurrection Bay we go and back to the characters we were introduced to in the first book of the series. Only this time, there are a lot of broken fences to be mended.

Caleb will be staying with his brother Ant but he’s in the process of putting his life back together after a battle with drugs. Kat, Caleb’s estranged Koori wife, is back in town and he’s unsure how he will deal with seeing her again. And then there’s the beach where he shot and killed a man in self-defense – the place that continues to cause him crippling nightmares.

His task in Resurrection Bay is threefold: find out the woman’s identity; find out who or what she was running from, and; find out who sent her to him in Melbourne.
It’s a task that will find him dealing with drug dealers, small-town racism and prejudice, property vandalism and vigilante violence. There’s a lot going on, particularly when you throw in appearances from possible Federal Police as well as his old partner Frankie who pops up out of the blue after betraying him in the worst possible way.

He embarks on this investigation with remarkable zeal, particularly when you consider this isn’t a paying gig – and therein lies my big problem.

The case becomes an obsession to the point where it affects the lives of just about everyone he cares about. As he continues to ignore the fact that he is putting the lives of others at risk because he refuses to ease up in his search, there is an increasing sense of pointlessness to his search.

Here is a guy who is investigating the death of a random woman for no real compelling reason. He is not being paid to perform the investigation. It is difficult to understand the reason for it to continue which I found caused me to become disengaged with the story.

Fortunately, Emma Viskic is a skilled storyteller and has been able to develop the relationships that were first established in the first book of the series, Resurrection Bay. It is due to these evolving relationships that there is reason to look forward to the next book in the series. Clearly, too, there are some unresolved threads that are being carried forward to the next book.

Caleb is a flawed character and, no, I’m not referring to his deafness. He is battling mental demons and his personal relationships are universally fraying. But he also has a way of getting to the heart of matters and certainly makes things happen.

I’ll be along for the next episode to see how he picks himself up again.