He gives his story deliciously noirish overtones, from the gorgeous bookseller with “troubled green eyes” named Mandalay Blonde (“Everyone calls me Mandy”), to the gloriously named local drunk, Harley Snouch, and the Black Dog Motel. Hammer’s writing is so evocative the heat practically rises off the pages of Scrublands a scene where the town’s men fight a bushfire is brought to life in terrifying style. Martin is writing a “one year on” piece, but soon finds himself drawn into the mystery of why Byron Swift summarily executed these five men in this town as “hot as Hades”. A year earlier, the town’s charismatic young priest inexplicably shot dead five members of his congregation, before he was killed himself. Martin Scarsden is a journalist with PTSD who is sent by his editor to Riversend (population 800).
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