James Delargy’s incendiary new crime thriller Into the Flames follows his two previous novels set in rural southeastern Australia. Inspiration for his latest may have been the terrifying 2019-20 bushfire season in New South Wales, and reminiscent of wildfires in Western Canada and the United States in recent years. But, with a twist.
The twist in this story comes as former Sydney police detective Alex Kennard is making a heroic effort to reach the hilltop home of a missing artist – Tracy Hilmeyer – on one of the most threatened blocks of one of the most imperilled streets in the fictional town of Rislake. Is Tracy refusing, like some residents, to evacuate? Or is she off on a painting expedition? No one knows. Kennard is determined to find out.
The superheated road surface pulls away as the tyres of his commandeered personnel carrier labour up the hill to the house Tracy shares with her husband, Russell. Russell is known to Alex, because he spent childhood summers in Rislake. He watched the adolescent Hilmeyer play footy and heard the predictions that he was destined for football greatness. Shortly after he married Tracy, though, he had a career-ending knee injury and everything since has been a disappointment.
Russell is determined to join Kennard in the PC, as is his friend Joel Anselmo, barnacled to his side. The three of them set out through the smoke and invective of the fire chiefs, not expecting to find much, certainly not what they do find – Tracy’s dead body, lying in a pool of blood in the front hallway. It takes a superhuman amount of cajoling to persuade the firefighters to concentrate their efforts on saving this one house, now a crime scene, and to get the necessary investigating officers up the hill to the endangered dwelling.
Kennard throws his official weight around to accomplish all this. He succeeds, in part, because the locals don’t know he’s damaged goods. Some months before, a hostage situation in suburban Sydney went wrong and a teenage boy committed suicide in front of a crowd wielding cell phones. They had the damning evidence, Kennard was given a new start and reassigned to the small town of Katoomba, an hour west of Sydney. He took the boy’s death and the reassignment personally, to a devastating extent. His too-quick temper has already managed to make him some enemies in his new home, and when, on his day off, he heard about the fire in Rislake, he decided to travel there and see whether he could help. Tracy Hilmeyer’s dead body changed everything.
His new boss in Katoomba doesn’t quite trust him and sends another detective to back him up. Kennard sees DS Georgina Layton as more the boss’s spy than a potential help, but she actually has a better understanding of his mental state than he does, and the two of them develop an uneasy working relationship.
All the usual trappings of a murder investigation are there – coroner’s reports, paper trails, motor vehicle searches, warrants, interviews, development of suspects. But they all takes place in the midst of an utter catastrophe. In fact, Kennard even suspects the fire may have been started in a clumsy attempt to cover up the murder.
Author James Delargy is good at developing a complicated plot, red herrings and all. And, if you like a flat-out adventure, this story moves quickly from one event to the next. His writing style doesn’t lend itself to much character development, though. He tends to tell you what his characters are feeling and not try for more subtler means to get their motivations across. As a result, you may not become much attached to any of them and may even dislike some.
What I did like was the set-up. The increasing number of devastating real-life wildfires around the world are a growing menace, and a story like this one vividly brings home some of the perils that such tragedies produce.
Also see Ryan Steck’s Fields of Fire or What Fire Brings by Rachel Howzell Hall.
Simon & Schuster
Print/Kindle
£7.99
CFL Rating: 3 Stars
