The Ash Verdict

About this book

Thirteen months after a bushfire took nineteen lives, a re-test shows that one victim was dead before the flames reached her. Detective Del Considine goes back to the high-country town she fled to find who hid a murder inside a catastrophe. A scorched country noir.

Thirteen months after the Black Week bushfire took nineteen lives, the high-country town of Yarran Flat has buried its dead and agreed to call it an act of God.

Then a coronial re-test of one victim’s body tells another story. Ruth Maitland — a retired arson investigator who had built her last home in a quiet gully — had no soot in her lungs. She was dead before the flames ever reached her.

Detective Del Considine is sent back to the town she fled at seventeen, the year her little brother burned to death in a fire that jumped its line. She knows this country. She knows how it talks, and what it refuses to say. And she knows that to murder a woman and hide her among nineteen, someone had to do the rarest thing in the valley: read the fire and the wind, and bend a catastrophe to their will.

That narrows it to the people the town trusts most — the volunteers, the burners, the hero everyone reveres. As Del and a wildfire scientist trace an impossible ignition back up the ridge, an old disappearance resurfaces, a convenient suspect dies too neatly, and the worst fire weather in a generation builds over the ranges.

To prove what she knows, Del will have to face a man who has spent his whole life reading the wind — on the one day the wind decides to turn.

A scorched, propulsive country-noir for readers who like their crime fiction atmospheric, their towns full of secrets, and their detectives carrying something they can’t put down. Grief, blame, and the human hand we would rather blame on nature.