Reviewed by Rod McLary
Hero is the fifth in the crime series featuring DS Lucas Walker and, though there are links and references to the earlier books, each one can be read as a stand-alone. Previously, DS Walker was with the Australian Federal Police where he had successfully arrested the Vandals leader Stefan Markovich. But the organised crime team of which he was a member was in disarray and his boss DCI Rutherford on suspension. Walker’s job had disappeared so he resigned and was offered a job in the Queensland Police Force where he hoped that he could join its organised crime team – but instead was given the post of detective sergeant in south-west Queensland. His place of work was 200 kilometers from his hometown of Caloodie where his cousin Blair, his wife Tracy and their two daughters live.
So the scene is set for another instalment in the life of Lucas Walker. The author has created a very engaging and likeable protagonist – one who values his extended family, loved his now deceased grandmother and is as much engaged with the activities of his family as he is with policing. The novels are also without the tropes which are often present in crime novels – the hard-bitten cop, the bitter family recriminations about time spent at work, and fraught relations with senior officers. All this contributes to an enjoyable read but, as one would expect with a crime novel, with criminality, violence and killing – and in the case of Hero corruption within the police force and the sporting arena.
The author in her Author’s Note [407ff] writes about the reach of sports gambling in Australia and the related corruption so it is clearly very concerning to her – and in Hero she has focussed on cricket largely because it is ‘a particularly potent standard-bearer of our national identity’ [409].
In a literary sense, this subject has opened up an entirely new area of criminality and corruption for DS Walker – and it is one which allows for a great deal of behind-the-scenes double-dealing and double-crossing where certain lawyers, police officers and sports people are corrupted by the promise of wealth and that strange phenomenon of basking in the light of someone else’s sun. But of course, there are consequences and for some the consequences are heavy indeed.
The narrative begins with the death of a young journalist who believes he is onto the story of the year – as indeed he would have been had he been able to pursue it to the end. However, after clever policing by DS Walker and his constable Vinh Nguyen, the death is linked to an earlier one similar in nature and as yet unsolved. As Lucas and Vinh begin their investigations and make some progress, the case is taken away from them and given to Homicide detectives from Brisbane – how and why this comes about is best left for the reader to discover. And it is indeed a tangled web of deceit.
And there is a lighter sub-plot too. The young woman Charli who has a coffee van in the local park takes a liking to Lucas and gradually in the course of the narrative, the pair work slowly towards a relationship. Where it goes only time will tell.
The central narrative though remains with the crimes and the exposure of those responsible and this is where the tension is. It is very much a complex and bitter web that is woven by the author with subterfuge, corruption and the creation of a public image very much at odds with the private image it is designed to conceal.
Hero is a worthy sequel to the earlier DS Walker novels and very much an enjoyable and exciting read.
Hero
[2026]
by Patricia Wolf
Echo Publishing
ISBN: 978 1 7865 8792 3
$34.99; 411pp