It has been nearly 20 years since Evelyn McCreery went missing. She went to sleep one night, in the bed next to her twin sister Mina’s; the next morning she was gone, her bed neatly made, no fingerprints on the windowsill, the only tyre tracks around their desolate farm property belonging to the farm cars. All these years later, Mina still lives there with her father, hoping Evelyn will be found, trying not to read all the online true crime gossip her sister’s disappearance still inspires to this day. When private investigator Lane Holland turns up, desperate for the reward money to keep his younger sister safe, Mina is dismissive – but Lane is determined, and Mina still wants answers, even while she’s tired of everything that’s come before. As Lane uncovers layers of what really went on in town and at Evelyn’s house that night, what was once hidden will be brought to light – and not only the McCreerys will feel the fallout.

Wake is the best kind of outback thriller – long distances between houses and safety, the quiet terror of rural Australia’s empty unknown spaces, small towns with suspicious characters. Mina and Lane are both walled off to outsiders by their own devastation, and readers’ hopes for a conclusion that never seems definite is a hook of the toughest steel. Like the book’s regional mystery stablemates Aoife Clifford or Benjamin Stevenson, Burr’s debut is there to show the world that Australian crime is really the superior of the genre. International crime fiction really should watch its back.