Fool’s Gold

 Fool’s Gold

Reviewed By  Ian Banks       March 23, 2018

 

Author  Fleur McDonald

Distributor:      Allen and Unwin
ISBN:                 9781760293963
Publisher:         Allen and Unwin
Release Date:   March 2018  

   Website:   https://www.allenandunwin.com

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Detective Dave Burrow’s has returned to the pages but with a significant difference;  it is 1997 and he is full of excitement to be at his first posting of Barrabine, a remote town on the edge of the goldfields. A place that is as dry and dusty as it is tenacious and tough.

His wife of two weeks, Melinda, is not filled with excitement at all. She has left a much loved career as a paediatric nurse, as well as family and friends, to come and live in this town. She realises it is lonely, hard and very definitely remote; a long, long way from all she is used to and not all she expected.

Before long Dave discovers the dry and dusty town holds secrets, and a series strange and unusual events begin to happen. Before long his first case appears in the form of a body discovered down a mine shaft. The question is asked as to how the body of Ross Pollard ended up in a mine shaft, as he was a man known by the locals, familiar with the local land and the disused mine shafts.

But the tragedy has roots that stretch back into the early history of the town, the death of woman found hanging in a tree by a stranger passing by and buried at the base of the same tree in 1947.

As the days pass Melinda finds her place in town, working as nurse, eventually coming to know the locals, while Dave and his partner Spencer become even more involved in what turns out to be a crime that has more than one player, with the layers simply get thicker and thicker.

The more they discover about the grab for land by a large corporation, blackmail and the death of a woman and her children more than 50 years before, they begin to look at the Miners and townspeople with very different eyes.

The final chapters to this ‘back to beginning’ Dave Burrow’s story, come to a resoundingly fitting end in true Fleur McDonald style. A stand-alone story at the end of the book fills in the gaps in relation to why Dave Burrow’s first began to take an interest policing and stock theft in remote areas.

This latest book rounds out the bits and pieces readers of this very likeable Detective Dave Burrows have always pondered over.

Fiction