Five went up. Only four came down . . .
In April 2006, fifteen-year-old Oliver went hiking to the lookout on Burning Mountain - and vanished without trace.
His schoolfriends – Bob, Bell, Phil and Paul – were the last ones to see him on the trek, yet the teenagers were never able to explain his disappearance.
Almost twenty years later, Detective Rebecca Giles is called to bushland on nearby Mount Wingen. There a skull has been dug up, reviving the mystery that has haunted the Upper Hunter area for years.
Giles is convinced that they have finally found the missing boy, and that his four friends – all now in their mid-thirties – have always known much more than they revealed. In particular, about the argument that caused Oliver to head down the mountain on his own.
But when she discusses the case with her father, retired Superintendent Benjamin Giles, another suspect is thrown into the mix. One that for Giles is uncomfortably close to home . . .
Burning Mountain, Darcy Tindale
Following on from the excellent debut THE FALL BETWEEN, author Darcy Tindale's BURNING MOUNTAIN shows absolutely no sign of the dreaded "second novel syndrome". The action here is as believable, and relevant to the place as in the earlier novel, Detective Rebecca Giles as hardworking as before, the team she works with as full of the small problems of life whilst also tackling a difficult job with dedication, and the past is allowed to leak into the current in a very apt, and sometimes personal manner.
For those that didn't read the first novel (you really should btw), Detective Rebecca Giles is back in the town of her birth, where her father is succumbing to an awful, and deadly, ailment. She had one of those childhoods, mother dead at a very young age, she was a typical country kid, raised by a caring but frequently overworked cop, Superintendent Benjamin Giles. Until she was suddenly sent away to boarding school, something she never quite understood, although the discovery of a skeleton buried on Mount Wingen sets off a chain of events, and unearths a suspect who starts to bring back some worrying memories.
The skeleton is eventually identified as fifteen-year-old Oliver who went missing in 2006 when he was hiking on nearby Burning Mountain with 4 school-friends. Supposedly, after a bit of a kids spat, at the top of the mountain, he'd hiked back to the pickup point where his mother expected to meet him, on his own. He wasn't there when she arrived and despite Giles senior pulling out all the stops with search parties combing the area, no trace of him was ever found. Until a skull is unearthed in that nearby location by a dog on a walk with its owner, and a well dug grave is then identified. Cue the difficulties associated with the forensic search for the body, then the retrieval, and finally identification, although the investigation itself has a bit of a head start because there aren't that many missing people in the area and there are clues on the skull that indicate a rough age for the victim.
Luckily Giles senior is still well enough to have his memories of the case, and the ability to talk about it, and he provides Giles the younger with an unexpected name, based on the loose idea that he was in the area at the time, and there were rumours, reports and worries about that man already. A time when the suspect lived next door to the Giles family home, and exhibited a lot of behaviour that looking at it with the eyes of an adult, Rebecca Giles can clearly see as the grooming of children.
Those revelations send her on a spiral of remembering, whilst also being very keen to catch this man, still resident in the area, still suspected it turns out. It's only the pointed guidance of her senior officer that stops her from doing some really precipitous things, as the investigation into who killed and buried young Oliver links up with old allegations of child abuse and child grooming. But Tindale isn't finished with her readers - not by a long shot, so there are plenty of twists and turns in this story, including (hard not to feel some pleasure in) the death of a domestic violence perpetrator and the story of his wife and child, before the final revelations fall into place.
Rebecca Giles is a great character - very real and believable. Her relationship with her Dad is touching, and his illness all the more sad because he was obviously a bloody good cop, and a loving, caring, if only slightly haphazard Dad. The sense of place is well delivered and the way that crimes intertwine with the life of small rural locations works, as does that idea of the things that people knew in the past and present and didn't talk about, being part of the stuff that comes back to bite hard years later.