Red Dirt Road by S.R. White

Publisher's Synopsis

One outback town. Two puzzling murders. Fifty suspects.

In Unamurra, a drought-scarred, one-pub town deep in the outback, two men are savagely murdered a month apart - their bodies elaborately arranged like angels.

With no witnesses, no obvious motives and no apparent connections between the killings, how can lone police officer Detective Dana Russo - flown in from hundreds of kilometres away - possibly solve such a baffling, brutal case?

Met with silence and suspicion from locals who live by their own set of rules, Dana must take over a stalled investigation with only a week to make progress.

But with a murderer hiding in plain sight, and the parched days rapidly passing, Dana is determined to uncover the shocking secrets of this forgotten town - a place where anyone could be a killer.

My Review of Red Dirt Road by S.R. White

The third book featuring Detective Dana Russo takes place in the tiny outback town of Unamurra where two people have been murdered over a 4 week period. The initial police investigation was perfunctory and yielded no results, so it was decided that Dana should be sent out to do a follow-up investigation. To make things that much more difficult, it appears her new boss is determined to set her up to fail and applies a ridiculously tight deadline for results while, at the same time, refusing to provide her with anything like the necessary supporting documents about the case.

Undaunted, she jumps on a plane and heads bush, making a two hour trip from the airport to Dutton, the first town before meeting up with Constable Able Barella, the police officer assigned to the town of Unamurra. It’s a further two hour drive into the endless dust fields of the outback before reaching the tiny community of Unamurra.

She embarks on her investigation and gets the predictable reaction from the locals. No-one’s particularly happy to see another detective in their midst, particularly when they thought the investigation was over and done. They answer her questions but still keep a great deal close to their chests. 

One of the unusual aspects of the case is the town art installation that consists of 28 statues of angels that are scattered around the town on movable frames. The artist has the habit of repositioning his work as the feeling takes him. But here’s the thing, the two murder victims were strung up and displayed on frames to look exactly like a couple of these angel statues!

So, murders displayed to make a statement to the rest of the township’s inhabitants, those same people unwilling to talk to a blow-in cop from the city, a ridiculously huge amount of mileage to cover just to interview people and an equally ridiculously short period of time in which to get it done. Dana’s up against it, but she uses an unorthodox method to get it done, one that completely takes Abe by surprise.

Weirdly, Dana uses her lack of local knowledge as an important asset in her investigation.

Red Dirt Road is a simple, yet complex outback noir mystery that depends a great deal on your ability to pay attention. The investigative style used by Dana is unorthodox and could lead you to assume that very little is going on. Make that assumption at your peril, don’t be like the frog in the cooking pot.

Using the local knowledge of Able to guide her through the many dangerous pitfalls both in the town and throughout the wider region, Dana covers a huge amount of ground in a very short period of time. And considering the mobile coverage in the area was spotty at best, she also managed to make great use of her great ally Lucy back at Central to provide her with vital background information. For all the appearances that Dana was on her own in a vastly foreign location, she was able to pull in significant resources to help put together her case.

The unusual location plays its role by emphasising the remoteness of Unamurra and the vulnerability of the town’s inhabitants. Similarly, the tiny nature of the town means there’s only a scant number of suspects making it much easier to guess the identity of the killer. The trick lies in figuring out the motivation behind the killings.

All in all, Red Dirt Road is a sedately paced mystery that depends heavily on the dialogue of the characters rather than their actions. It pays to be patient with it, though, particularly with the overlong explanation by Dana of how she figured everything out which spans a full 50 pages.