Skull River, Pip Fioretti

Mounted Trooper Augustus Hawkins was introduced to readers in Fioretti's first novel, BONE LANDS. Returned from active service in the Boer War, he's scarred physically and mentally, tortured by what happened in combat, damaged again by the love he found in the first novel having been cruelly torn away from him by a snobby family and society's expectations about class and more pointedly, money.

SKULL RIVER finds him transferred to a new post in the small, fading gold town of Colley in New South Wales. A day's ride from Bathurst, you'd think there wasn't going to be much to this place: a few drunks needing locking up, stock rustling crimes, the occasional breakout of violence amongst the miners still scratching around the area, and the constant need to move on prostitutes and other less "savoury" aspects of life on petering out goldfields. His first day finds him heading straight out of town to a nearby settlement and reports of trouble there, caught up instead in the ambush shooting murder of his junior officer, the burning down of the police station, and a level of tension and terror he was not really prepared for.

What comes after that are problems with accommodation, for him, the police office, and the reinforcements that eventually arrive, around a markedly hostile reception from the local hotel owner. To say nothing of the discovery of an unidentified body in the smouldering remains of the police lockup, some very dodgy procedural bending in police communication lines, all the current police records destroyed in the fire, and a dead trooper who would have known who the man in the lockup was, had he not been killed, his body ritualistically maimed, and returned to town on the back of his own horse.

A lot happens in very short time in SKULL RIVER, alongside Hawkins trying to work out who was who and how everything and everybody in the town fits together, and what he did and didn't do here. He's been in Colley once before, when he was drinking way too much and the PTSD was at its worst. He might not remember everything that happened back then, but there are a few locals who are all too able to recall. 

Meanwhile, the ambush shooting turns into a tricky investigation, not helped by the reinforcements being inexperienced young troopers, easily spooked, and the assigned detective a useless drunk, along with the higher ups in Bathurst being shiny bummed and antagonistic. Because hatred of the mounted troopers is nothing new in early white settlement days, as is the overt racism, sexism, puritanical zeal, sexual misbehaviour, violence, and utter disregard for human and animal lives alike, the suspect pool is well populated, murky and more than a bit on the nose. Although there are moments of lightness, Mrs Owen, her goats and her ministrations, a young boy with Downs Syndrome and his mother, and a band of prostitutes who start out providing a bit of harmless insult slinging, and turn out to have had their own problems with that aforementioned pool.

The novel probably should come with a trigger warning though - there are a lot of violent horse deaths in particular in this story, as well as cattle, and whilst Hawkins feels these and they aren't necessarily gratuitous but clear indicators of attitudes and the reality of the time, there is the potential for some readers to find it confronting.

At the centre of both these novels however, is a man broken by his personal experience of war, and disappointment, in a country of the verge of change, with a life that he needs to get control of. He has a close connection to his father, mostly by stint of letters they share, and he's basically a decent man, who made mistakes when obviously in the thrall of severe shell shock / PTSD. His attempts to improve his own life, and do right by the people he's pledged to protect and serve are wonderfully evoked, as is his love for the stray dog that he forms a close attachment to. Alfie's a great character in is own right, and surely the epitome of a service dog in the making. Alfie, and the sly, sometimes very dry sense of humour that this author has given her main character make this dark but not always desperate reading though - and the sense of time and place are vivid and fascinating. Hawkins is not a man "longing for the green fields of home", he's a white Australian who gets the beauty of the landscape, even if large parts of it have been battered by gold mining and the pollution and disruption left in its wake.

Whilst the killer of young trooper is eventually identified, there's damage, and fall out that the town is going to take a while to recover from, if ever. And Hawkins has a decision to make about his own future, having turned down the potential of returning to the LIghthorse, he's aware that his activities as a Mounted Trooper are causing him more stress than solace. And then there's that love interest, a woman about to be married off for her family's fortunes to be improved. He's already mulling his future, when a blast from the past limps up the hill to the police paddock he's pitched his tent in until the station is rebuilt.