Chain of Evidence

The fourth book in Garry Disher’s Peninsula murder mystery series.

He waited by the van’s open door, a clipboard in his hand. Surely she’d be along soon, dreamily pumping the pedals of her bike, helmet crooked on her gleaming curls, backpack bumping against her downy spine.

Twice now he’d watched her take this detour after school, down to the waterfront reserve, to the magic of the Waterloo Show. Dodgem cars, Ferris wheel, fairy floss on a stick. The Show was a magnet to all kinds of kids, but he had chosen only one.

… … … …

Ten-year-old Katie Blasko is missing.

Detective Sergeant Ellen Destry, alert to rumours of a paedophile ring operating on the Peninsula, is thinking abduction. Her colleagues are thinking bad family, truancy. Her boss is thinking about the media. And everyone, including Ellen, is wondering whether she’s good enough to handle this without D. I. Challis.

But Hal Challis is a thousand kilometres away, watching his father die. Ellen Destry’s running the show on her own. And if she’s right, Katie Blasko may be running out of time.

Praise for Chain of Evidence:

‘As proof of the continuing high standard of Australian crime novels and thrillers, you need only pencil in Garry Disher’s Chain of Evidence as exhibit A.’

Australian

‘In his best novel yet in what has been a distinguished career, he propels us methodically yet elegiacally, the past impending on the present and setting the future into sometimes quite astonishing motion. [Disher’s] fiction is a kind of social barometer of prevailing tensions and social forces in the community, especially in the outlying badlands of Australia’s provincial coastal towns with their acts of deep, dark, destructive psychology. … Now on the same procedural shelf as international greats such as John Harvey, Tony Hillerman and Ian Rankin, Disher brings crime fiction back to simple facts, the painful themes that churn beneath banal surfaces. No one works the flat, elided plains of realism better.’

Graeme Blundell, Weekend Australian

‘The plot twists lie a backroad short cut and pulls like the rip.’

Sunday Age

‘Disher is definitely not to be missed.’

Toronto Globe & Mail

‘Another powerful statement from one of Australia’s top crime writers.’

Courier-Mail