CLAIRE SUTHERLAND The Crag. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm

In Claire Sutherland’s debut crime novel, a body is found on an isolated track on the Wimmera Plains, where Mount Arapiles towers over all.

Anybody who has ever spent any time in the Wimmera around Gariwerd (the Grampians) in Victoria will know how striking the contrast is between the vast flat plains and the sudden, towering mountain range. It’s an astounding sight, bringing to mind the ancient age of the landscape and, if you look at the climbing faces of Mount Arapiles, the danger that awaits the unwary.

This enormous old sea cliff rises from the relentless flatness of the Wimmera district like Uluru. With more than three thousand climbing routes snaking up its faces, it is world-renowned in climbing circles, but barely known to anyone else. Even the locals hardly visit. Most of them think the climbers are mad. Why scale it when there is a tourist road to the lookout at the top?

The author calls herself a weekend warrior when it comes to rock-climbing, but her husband is an experienced mountaineer, and her knowledge of the area, and the sensibilities of its people, comes across as assured and real without being cloying or romanticised.

The Crag opens with a prologue that reminds us of human dangers:

Flashes. Darkness then distant asterisks of light then darkness. The sky? Yes, the sky. Branches arching over the road, momentarily blocking the stars above. The wind on her face but not on her body. Was she wrapped in something? The engine loud, straining. Fear beginning to stir, then rearing, poised to overwhelm. Then nothing. Grey seeping from the sides of her eyes until the last pinprick of light winked out.

The first chapters then switch to the dangers presented by the natural world:

They were boys.

They were always boys.

Stuck halfway up Skink, the void sucking at their backs, no moves left and the ground eighty metres below them. They were now resigned to the humiliation of rescue. Skye knew they’d still crack a few jokes in weak, wavering voices, an attempt at bravado, but they and everyone else would know they were shit-scared, near tears and thinking of their mums.

The thing about Mount Arapiles and the Wimmera, and most regional areas in Australia for that matter, is that self-reliance is mandatory, and in this area in particular, climbers are rescued quite often, mostly by the local climbing community. Skye is just such a local, born and bred on one of the farms on those endless plains, growing up to join the ambulance service, followed by a stint in Melbourne and a return to Horsham with the love her life, Callum. They needed a change, a simpler life post Covid lockdowns – for Skye, to escape the increasing craziness of being an emergency services worker, and for Callum, to escape some of the excesses he had got caught up in, mostly courtesy of his brother Andrew, a man whose life has spiralled out of control thanks to an ice addiction and many poor decisions.

It’s on one of Skye’s long walks with her dogs, down a rough bush track, that she discovers the body of a woman dumped near a crumbling old house. Skye’s been leery about that location ever since she encountered an odd man shooting out there a while ago.

It wasn’t until she spied the sporadic empty shotgun shells that stood out like colourful crayons in a landscape of beige and rust that she remembered why she hadn’t been here in well over a year. She’d made a promise to Callum, and herself, not to come out this way on her own again.

It’s this discovery that introduces her best friend from school, Senior Constable Sylvie Merry, and then the chief investigators into the death, Senior Detective Elly Shaw and her partner Sam McPherson, who find they have a real mystery on their hands. The woman isn’t local, and this isn’t the sort of area where a stranger would go unremarked. Although there is a farm nearby in Natimuk, and a farmer with a history of domestic violence who has been involved with the local police over the years.

There’s a really strong sense of place in this novel. The author has a keen eye for the nuances of the landscape, from the broad farming plains to the mountain range itself. There are descriptive elements here that sing stories of the places and celebrate the rugged, challenging landscape. There are also elements that highlight the difficulties of life out in the regions. The distances, the particular sorts of jobs ambulances and police attend on a regular basis – accidental farm shootings / minibus crashes / tractor accidents / people falling off things and under things. All these little glimpses provide hints of day-to-day life, alongside the coffees and meals out, film nights with friends, dog walks, and Skye and Callum talking about starting a family – a plan overshadowed by Callum’s past drug use, questionable friends, and attachment to brother Andrew, all of which have left Skye struggling to trust him.

Identification of the dead woman comes about as a result of dogged police procedure – checking missing persons reports, looking for clues – until eventually a Brazilian backpacker named Adalita Alves comes to light. This leads to the trail of a traveller recently arrived in Australia: a stay with a friend that ended oddly, and a website offering jobs in the bush – fruit picking, cooking for work crews and the like. Adalita had boarded a train in Melbourne heading for one of those jobs, but never arrived. She vanished somewhere around Ararat, and the task of tracking her final moments isn’t helped by the lack of witnesses, cameras, or records. Until there’s a tenuous connection to the climbing walls on Mt Arapiles, and Skye is brought into the team as a specialist consultant. Victims of domestic violence are discovered, and, sadly, another body.

It’s never an easy undertaking to write a book set in a community that is made up of incomers like the climbing community and locals with generations of forbears buried in the local cemeteries. Particularly when the author is one of those incomers herself. But Sutherland is a journalist by trade, and there’s obviously something in the skill set of the job that helps. That and some empathy.

Skye saw plenty of death in her job, but usually it was fresh death accompanied by deep outpourings of shock and love from friends and relatives, confirmation that the person was loved and would be missed.

In The Crag she’s written a story that straddles both these communities well, just as her main characters do on a daily basis. She’s also written some excellent lead female characters. There are realistic and believable blokes in this novel, but the standouts are Skye and the ragged circle she’s trying to draw Elly into. Both these women are flawed and fragile, strong and very determined. They go into this novel a bit rough around the edges and a little damaged. They come out of it carrying a few more scars, some strength they didn’t know they had, and a determination and decency that shines through.

Claire Sutherland The Crag Affirm Press 2024 PB 320pp $32.99

Karen Chisholm blogs from austcrimefiction.org, where she posts book reviews as well as author biographies.

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Tags: Australian crime fiction, Australian women writers, Claire | Sutherland, Gariwerd, Mount Arapiles, murder, rock-climbing, the Wimmera