Garry Disher "Whispering Death"

Six titles into the Challis and Destry series you sense Garry Disher has a few characters and situations at the Waterloo Police Station approaching their use by dates.

Hal Challis may have had his share of professional and personal troubles in the past, but he should be reasonably happy as he heads towards a new phase in his developing relationship with Ellen Destry, but she’s off to Europe on a study tour and will be setting up a new Sex Crimes Unit when she gets back. He’s still having issues with her daughter Larayne, and will be sort of house sitting and doing a few odd jobs around the place Ellen bought after the marriage broke up.

Scobie Sutton’s wife seems to be coming out of depression, while his daughter continues to be the apple of his eye and he’s starting to find the grim reality of police work difficult to deal with and Constable Pam Murphy has issues with anti-depressants after events in the previous episode in the series and the physical symptoms that ensue when you stop taking the things.

On top of the soap opera side of things Disher serves up an intriguing blend of plot lines that start out separately and end up intertwining neatly.

The first involves a rapist wearing a police uniform. Rogue cop or impersonator? That seems to be a fairly natural question to ask, and one that, at the same time, an investigating officer would be looking to avoid answering directly. When Challis is confronted by a journo who insists on asking it he responds with spray to about budget cutbacks in an area where the population is expanding rapidly. Predictably, this doesn’t go down well with his superiors.

The rape investigation brings a feisty sergeant from the Sex Crimes Unit into the picture. After she returns from Europe this role would be filled by Ellen Destry, but while Jeannie Schiff is on the scene she ruffles a few feathers among the male officers and lays down a possible soap opera development as far as Pam Murphy is concerned.

Matters are complicated by the fact that the rapist knows enough about forensics to make it difficult to track him down, and after the first victim is found wandering dazed and naked in a nature reserve, a second is found dead in the boot of a crashed car.

The second involves a female cat burglar who, by rights, shouldn’t enter into things at all. She lives across on the western side of Port Phillip but gets there on her way back from interstate jobs using the ferry that crosses from the Mornington Peninsula after she’s deposited the proceeds of her latest job in a safe deposit box in Challis’ base at Waterloo.

While she’s careful to avoid working in her own state, the result of careful grounding in the basics of maintaining a low profile delivered by a crooked former cop who is looking to track her down and even up a few old scores, a series of coincidences brings that policy unstuck.

You know the cat burglar will become involved in the main plot, though it’s not immediately clear how Disher’s going to do it, and he muddies the water a bit further by arranging a home invasion by the the bikies living next door to Destry's new house and having the bloke responsible for a series of bank robberies looking to be heading towards Waterloo as well.

Challis, meanwhile, has a Triumph TR4 sports car he may as well dispose of since it is finally starting to fall apart and a restored 1930s Dragon Rapide that he has worked on for a decade but since it represents a phase of his life that has come to an end it might as well go too.

Those matters come on top of the rape investigation in a station that’s stretched as far as they can go. Challis lands himself in hot water for shooting his mouth off to the local media about budget cuts.

Meanwhile a socially conscious graffiti commentator is spray painting announcements like CASHED UP BOGAN LIVES HERE and I’M COMPENSATING FOR A SMALL DICK on driveway entrances that lead to architectural monstrosities erected (and I’m using that verb deliberately) by newly arrived residents with more cash than taste and no sense of humour.

Disher weaves these different lines around each other, keeping the tension between individual characters tightly wound and bringing the lot together at the end, filling in the relevant bits of back story for readers who aren’t up to speed on the earlier episodes,  doing it concisely enough so it doesn’t become an issue for those of us who have and leaving enough space for readers to go back and explore those earlier episodes should they feel so inclined.

That’s a rather tricky juggling act, but Disher, as long term fans have come to expect, carries it off with panache, delivering a complex story that works on just about every front. He’s a class act, who consistently delivers and this is one of his best.

Garry Disher "Blood Moon"

Following almost straight on from Chain of Evidence, Blood Moon has Hal Challis back from South Australia with things following a predictable course as far as the house-sitting Ellen Destry is concerned. That course, however, while predictable, has implications for the future of both parties, and there are the predictable moving into a relationship considerations that come where one party moves into the other's pre-existing setup.

As far as the professional futures are concerned it's obvious Challis and Destry can't carry on as part of the same investigative unit, at least not while they're obviously shacked up together. One doesn't notice the same issues rearing their ugly heads in other series where you have colleagues falling into the sack together, but that's presumably because they're able to maintain a fictional independence through separate residential addresses.

That's not the sort of thing, however, that's going to go down well with Superintendent McQuarrie, Challis' boss, who he's crossed swords with in the past, and an interview with the boss early on in proceedings has McQuarrie pointing out in the old days one of you would have been posted to Outer Woop-Woop but to leave it with me and he'll presumably see what he can come up with.

If that's an unexpectedly sympathetic McQuarrie, the form reversal can largely be attributed to the discovery of Lachlan Roe, chaplain at an exclusive private school, bashed and left for dead on his front lawn. Roe has links to Opposition Leader Ollie Hindmarsh, who has been known to be extremely critical of the Victorian Police Force so it's hardly surprising that McQuarrie wants things tackled with kid gloves.

It's not as if that's the only thing the Waterloo Police have to deal with. For a start it's Schoolies' Week with the predictable law enforcement issues as hordes of school leavers move into sex, drugs and rock'n'roll party mode and numbers of older toolies turn up to take advantage of the inebriatedly vulnerable.

Among those ranks is Josh Brownlee, who's bringing his own issues to this year's Schoolies' after being a genuine participant last year, attracting the attention of Kaz Moon, surf boutique manager who's out for revenge for an alleged rape last year and has an imaginative take on the concept of extra-legal revenge.

Then there's the murder of town planning infringements officer Ludmilla Wishart, who has apparently stumbled on evidence of corruption in the approvals process in an area favoured by well-heeled people with money looking to erect substantial monuments to their own lack of taste.

Ludmilla ('Mill' to her close acquaintances) is in a position where she's likely to rub up any number of influential people the wrong way, and is married to architect Adrian, who's the sort of obsessively jealous control freak who may well have done his missus in if he thought she was wandering.

He's the sort of bloke whose microscopic attention to detail would, you'd expect, have any sensible woman terminating the relationship before it got the chance to go anywhere (he's the type to tally up the cost of hot water in showers and monitor the use of toilet paper) and while she's in receipt of advice to do just that she knows that in his own words the only way you'll leave me is in a coffin.

And, as you'd expect, within the police station relationships are reshaping and realigning. Plodding good with detail man Scobie Sutton's ultra-religious wife is veering towards the First Ascensionists, an obscure sect with connections to Lachlan Roe and Ollie Hindmarsh, Pam Murphy, freshly promoted to plainclothes work, is attracted to glamorous city boy cop Andy Cree, getting her ex-operational partner John 'Tank' Tankard's nose out of joint in the process.

As usual, Disher takes the apparently unconnected strands and ongoing issues, winds then neatly around each other and keeps enough unsuspected snippets up his sleeve to add the odd new and unexpected element to the mix as things progress through the lunar eclipse that gives the book its title.

With the latest title in the series (Whispering Death) just out there's a natural inclination to rush in and grab a copy, but there's a reluctance, at the same time, to do that right now, given the likely lead-time before a seventh title appears. I have a suspicion that short-term curiosity is going to win out.

Garry Disher "Snapshot"

Given the fact that the Inter-Library Loan turned out not being an option, and with no visit to the Gold Coast with the subsequent opportunity to check whether there's a copy in the library there, reading the Challis and Destry novels in sequence meant I was going to have to buy a copy, and a visit to Fishpond produced a US hardback copy from the Soho Crime imprint.

After The Dragon Man and Kittyhawk Down there are a couple of developing inter-personal loose ends that need tidying, and while Snapshot doesn't quite deliver Inspector Challis and Detective Sergeant Ellen Destry into a relationship you can see that's where they're going to end up eventually. Whether that'll be an on-going concern is anybody's guess.

Snapshot starts with a rather clever bit of reader manipulation, with psychological counsellor Janine McQuarrie generating a fair degree of reader sympathy as we learn that having succumbed to her husband's pressure and joined in the erotic adventures on the Mornington Peninsula swingers' circuit she's apparently found the prospect of true love elsewhere.

She's driving her seven-year-old daughter around with her on a pupil-free day as she muses on these matters, before being shot in an obvious contract hit outside a rundown weatherboard house on a quiet country road near Penzance Beach. The daughter would have died as well, but the hit man's pistol misfires.

You get an inkling that she's not quite the assassinated innocent from the fact that she has just posted off some photos from the most recent orgy to several male participants, including her husband. Police inquiries reveal she's not that popular with colleagues or clients either, so there are plenty of possible motives for the hit.

There's also an additional complication since she's the daughter-in-law of Hal Challis' boss Detective Superintendent McQuarrie, who's inclined to meddle even when he's not personally linked to a case. His son, of course, has to be a prime suspect, but he's hardly the only one, and Dad seems more interested in protecting the son than finding the killer.

The reader already knows who carried out the hit, so there's the regular challenge of spotting the way Disher's going to line things up for a solution as the hit man receives frequent instructions via text messages from an anonymous employer and goes about removing various figures around the periphery of the case whose continued existence could prove problematic.

Along the way, as things unfold there are the interpersonal dynamics that drive a good series, both inside Waterloo Police Station and among the officers' nearest and dearest.

Detective Sergeant Destry's marriage continues to disintegrate. Well-meaning Sergeant Scobie Sutton continues to extol the wonders of his ten year old daughter to an uninterested audience while his wife gets the chop from her welfare job with the notification arriving via email. Constables Pam Murphy and John Tankard still manage to only just tolerate each other as they drive a sports car around the district in a public relations exercise, rewarding courteous drivers with bags of goodies.

As has been the case through the other Disher titles I've read, the author integrates these elements seamlessly, switching perspective adroitly and sketching in any relevant details where they need to sneak in without disrupting the flow of the on-going narrative. That means you can read his work out of sequence, handy in a world where some of the earlier titles might not be that easy to track down in your local bookshop, though it also means you aren't going to get the unfolding interpersonal dynamics in quite the same way.

That's a significant consideration because it's the characters as much as the deftness with which Dis\her manipulates the elements in his plot line that are likely to bring the reader back to line up for the next one in the series. Disher's success in that regard can be gauged from the fact that within twenty-four hours of finishing Snapshot I had borrowed Chain of Evidence from the local library, knocking it over within a day, and if it's more than twenty-four hours before I'm queueing up for their copy of Blood Moon that'll only be because I've got a Shane Maloney Murray Whelan trilogy and another title I borrowed at the same time as Chain of Evidence.