A teenage boy takes a girl and her sister to Stone Town’s eerie bushland in the dark of night, in the hopes of impressing her with the alarming shrieks of a Barking Owl – but they find the dead body of local developer Aidan Sleeth instead. Sleeth’s death by gunshot sees local Senior Sergeant Mark Ariti working the case with two homicide cops from Adelaide who are, Mark thinks, too distracted by another case on their radar: missing police officer Natalie Whitsed, who disappeared after tracking the young wife of a gangland boss. All of Australia is following Natalie’s case, and now it’s interfering in Mark’s business too, not least when his sometime friend, Assistant Commissioner Angelo Conti, calls up with information that will shed new light on what’s happening in Stone Town.

Mark’s aware that nothing is cut and dried in the world of crime, and the events of Margaret Hickey’s previous bestseller, Cutters End, are still playing on his mind. Sleeth was a property developer in a place where land is worth more than just the money you can get for it – and rural Australian towns in crime fiction are not known for taking these kind of things lightly.

Hickey takes the genre of rural crime and runs with it: country fairs, a bush telegraph faster than police radio, long- held secrets, and extended drives to brutal crime scenes. Hickey’s work is gloriously free of stereotypes, leading to intriguing characters searching for the truth – or trying to hide it. Settle in with Stone Town, and if you hear a scream in the distance, it’s surely just a Barking Owl, dear reader – don’t you worry at all.

Fiona Hardy is a bookseller, author, and our monthly crime fiction columnist.