Chain of Evidence Garry Disher 2007

Dustjacket synopsis:
"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 Peninsular, 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."

Quotes:
"Disher is delivering the best crime fiction around" - Peter Corris
"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

First Paragraph

Down here in Victoria he was the Rising Stars Agency, but he'd been Catwalk Casting up in New South Wales, and Model Miss Promotions in Queensland before that. Pete Duyker figured that he had another three months on the Peninsula before the cops and the Supreme Court caught up with him again, obliging him to move on.

"Gorgeous," he said, firing off a few shots with the Nikon that had no film in it but was bulky and professional-looking, and emitted all of the expected clicks and whirs. For his other work he was strictly digital.

The mother simpered. "Yeth," she said, reminding Pete of that old Carry On movie, the doctor with his stethoscope saying "Big breaths" and the tarty teenager in his consulting room saying, "Yeth, and I'm only thixteen." He fired off a few more shots of the woman's five-year-old. The brat's lank hair scarcely shifted in the breeze on the top of Arthur's Seat, the waters of the bay and the curve of the Peninsula spreading dramatically behind her, the smog-hazed towers of Melbourne faintly visible to the northwest. "Just gorgeous," he reiterated, snapping away.

From the Text paperback edition, 2007.

Note:
This novel is number 4 in the Detective Inspector Hal Challis series.

This page and its contents are copyright © 2007 by Perry Middlemiss, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Last modified: August 8, 2007.