“The Seven, my dear. We do take ourselves so seriously. Who knows what skeletons our budding historian might find…and in whose cupboards he might find them?”
Those skeletons are legion and come rattling out of copious cupboards in Chris Hammer’s latest blockbuster crime saga, THE SEVEN.
Hammer once again engineers a cracking crime thriller with the threads of history winding their way through the landscape and its people, friends and foe, family and flings, juggling three different timelines, until they finally converge in a culmination of secrets and discovery.
THE SEVEN begins with a prologue of exhilarating panache, a water ski sequence of thrills and suspense that sets up the present day police investigation.
We are then transported back in time, a hundred and ten years, to 1913 and a letter written by an indigenous woman indentured to a well heeled white family in the Riverina. This is the first of a correspondence that courses through THE SEVEN, a shaded and shadowing tributary that joins the two other strands of the story to form the main stream of the narrative.
Hammer shows to be an adept and adroit writer of early 20th Century prose, even invoking some Gothic brush strokes evoking a character redolent of Rochester from Jane Eyre, deftly differentiating style and syntax from the contemporary descriptions.
Like the classic crime film, Chinatown, water is the catalyst to crime corruption in THE SEVEN, its value and manipulation motive for murder, with water barons and irrigation cartels profiteering from a basic commodity.
THE SEVEN also takes a swipe at the opacity of political donations in Australia, hidden from public scrutiny, with undetectable dirty donations laundered by nefarious individuals and organisations. And of the current Australian malign of high rents and low welfare.
Starring the homicide detective duo, Ivan Lucic and Nell Buchanan, from his previous caper, The Tilt, THE SEVEN cements Chris Hammer as not only one of Australia’s finest crime writers, but one of our finest writers, full stop.
THE SEVEN by Chris Hammer is published by Allen& Unwin