Moonlight Downs (2008) by Adrian Hyland. Diamond Dove.
Good Reads meta-data is 304 pages, rated 3.79 by 742 litizens
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Strine, Abo.
Verdict: Bony revivicus!
Tagline: Whew! Deep, dank, and dark.
The prodigal daughter return to her tribal roots in the Red Centre of Australia populated by aboriginals, miners, graziers, and public servants. They have one thing in common, water. They all need it.
Daughter of miscegenation, a word seldom used these days, she has a Napoleon ‘Bony’ Bonaparte foot in both the black and the white worlds. Most of the miners are thugs for whom the meaning of life is a beer can. The graziers aren’t much different. The civil servants are a sorry lot consigned to this purgatory.
A tribal elder who was widely respected for his common sense and ability to navigate and negotiate land rights with the miners, graziers, and civil servants, is murdered. Who dunnit and why?
Daughter sets out to find out, while plod is not much interested in what seems like a black on black murder. Though, credit to the writer, plod is not cardboard.
There is a long overture and then many details of aborigine life in the interior, and some insight into the grazier who is a stereotype until…. There is a great deal of trip and the arrival was a little off centre I thought. I wondered if it complied with the Decalogue in substance.
This is the first of a sequence, though I expect it will be hard to top.
Hmm, I should also have said above that I found the constant accumulation of metaphors to describe the outback and its denizens got to be annoying. A case of trying too hard to be different. It got to be distracting, too, making it hard to distinguish the important from the background colour.
It was originally published by Text in Australia as Diamond Dove. But when SoHo reprinted it for the international (read American) market, the title was changed for reasons that are not apparent to this reader.