Hirsch’s rural beat is wide. Daybreak to day’s end, dirt roads and dust. Every problem that besets small towns and isolated properties, from unlicensed driving to arson. In the time of the virus, Hirsch is seeing stresses heightened and social divisions cracking wide open. His own tolerance under strain; people getting close to the edge.
Today he’s driving an international visitor around: Janne Van Sant, whose backpacker son went missing while the borders were closed. They’re checking out his last photo site, his last employer. A feeling that the stories don’t quite add up.
Then a call comes in: a roadside fire. Nothing much – a suitcase soaked in diesel and set alight. But two noteworthy facts emerge. Janne knows more than Hirsch about forensic evidence, and the body in the suitcase is not her son’s.
Day’s End is the fourth book in Garry Disher’s Hirsch series, with protagonist Paul Hirschhausen still working in the large surrounding region of Tiverton, South Australia.
As always, the South Australian landscape is vividly depicted, looming large over the story and the isolation adding a sense of menace to the novel’s tense events.
While this isn’t a pandemic story, Disher uses the pandemic as a tool throughout, adding to the tension. Hirsch is joined by Janne Van Sant, whose son Willi went missing while the borders were closed – any parent’s nightmare. The property where Willi last worked has a sign on the gate: “Unvaccinated visitors welcome here… We refuse to enforce unlawful directions from a government that would microchip its people.”
Disher uses Willi’s case as a major thread throughout the novel, however Hirsch is dealing with more than a missing Dutch backpacker. Several cases merge, with themes around extremism, politics, drugs, racism and conspiracy theories. On the home front, the ever-likable Hirsch is juggling girlfriend Wendy and her daughter Kate, who has her own issues.
Disher is consistently excellent and has once again delivered an impressive rural crime. Consolation, book #3 in the Hirsch series, was the Winner of the 2021 Best Crime Fiction Ned Kelly Award. Day’s End is every bit as good, if not better. For any reader who loves Australian outback noir, the Hirsch series needs to be at the top of your TBR pile. It doesn’t get better than this.
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