Treasure and Dirt by Chris Hammer

Publisher's Synopsis

In the desolate outback town of Finnigans Gap, police struggle to maintain law and order. Thieves pillage opal mines, religious fanatics recruit vulnerable young people and billionaires do as they please.

Then an opal miner is found crucified and left to rot down his mine. Nothing about the miner's death is straightforward, not even who found the body. Sydney homicide detective Ivan Lucic is sent to investigate, assisted by inexperienced young investigator Nell Buchanan.

But Finnigans Gap has already ended one police career and damaged others, and soon both officers face damning allegations and internal investigations. Have Ivan and Nell been set up and, if so, by whom?

As time runs out, their only chance at redemption is to find the killer. But the more secrets they uncover, the more harrowing the mystery becomes, as events from years ago take on a startling new significance.

For in Finnigans Gap, opals, bodies and secrets don't stay buried forever.

My Review of Treasure & Dirt by Chris Hammer

The first book in Chris Hammer’s second series following the raging success of the Martin Scarsden series re-introduces DS Ivan Lucic, a minor player in the earlier books, notably Trust. The tough, sparse inland Australian landscape is once again critical to setting the tone of the book and, as has become almost expected, the plot is devious and littered with unexpected moments that left me nodding with appreciation. 

In the opal mining town of Finnegan’s Gap a man is found dead in his own opal mine. Jonas McKee has been crucified, if you don’t mind. To top it off, the entrance of his mine had been locked closed at the time.

Sent out from Sydney to run the investigation is DS Ivan Lucic and assisting him is DC Nell Buchanan who has been called in from Bourke because she has previously spent three years in the town and will be familiar with the people and places.

One of the major selling points of Treasure and Dirt is the rich descriptions of Finnegan’s Gap and the surrounding countryside. There’s very little beauty to be found in a hot, dry and forbidding landscape but Chris Hammer manages to bring out every last detail with amazing clarity and, at the very least, ensures that we understand just how dangerous a place the setting is. 

At first, the death of McKee appears reasonably straightforward, after all, he’s nailed to a cross. But on closer inspection, there are aspects that don’t follow any reasonable narrative. Ivan and Nell start talking to the locals and quickly come to realise that when you’re dealing with a small community, everyone knows everyone else’s business and there are many possible motives that can result in a violent crime.

Muddying the waters of the investigation are a few unusual characters who catch the eye of both Lucic and Buchanan. The first is the head of the local religious group known as the Rapture, a man who calls himself The Seer. Then there’s a pair of mining magnates who have been in the area recently, one owns a nearby open-cut coal mine while the other is putting together a deal to purchase a potential lucrative rare earths mining site. All three are highly colourful characters who add plenty of intrigue to the story, provide somewhat of a sideshow that is highly entertaining and offer a tantalising hint that they may be somehow related to a lowly dead opal miner.

I enjoyed the crash course in opal mining and the geology lesson to explain how the opals were formed and where you can expect to find them. I also appreciated the portrayal of the miners, the psychology of the ratters (thieves who enter other people’s mines to steal their unprocessed opals), and pretended to understand the economics of the big business types out to make a killing on the stock market. You can’t fault the detail into which Hammer explains things and it all helps to bring the story together to create a cunning plot.

Lucic and Buchanan work very well together, particularly when faced with their own moments of adversity and moral dilemmas. I have to admit, I didn’t like Ivan at all in the Scarsden books but have come to understand his personal philosophy and respect him for it. Buchanan has proven that she’s more than a capable detective and it feels as though we’ve just scratched the surface through the course of this book.

I found this to be a completely engaging thriller that uses the characters and the surrounding landscape to its full potential. The plot was well constructed, full of surprises as well as the odd moments of heartbreak and regret. It’s another triumph from a crime writer who has definitely hit his straps here.