Review: BLACK RIVER, Matthew Spencer

• 
  this book made available as an e-book on Libby through my local library
  
• author website
• eBook ISBN: 9781761064388
• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Publication Date: 31 May 2022
• Page Extent: 352
   

Synopsis (author website)

A long, burning summer in Sydney. A young woman found murdered in the deserted grounds of an elite boarding school. A serial killer preying on victims along the banks of the Parramatta River. A city on edge.

Adam Bowman, a battling journalist who grew up as the son of a teacher at Prince Albert College, might be the only person who can uncover the links between the school murder and the 'Blue Moon Killer'. But he will have to go into the darkest places of his childhood to piece together the clues. Detective Sergeant Rose Riley, meanwhile, is part of the taskforce desperately trying to find the killer before he strikes again. Adam Bowman's excavation of his past might turn out to be Rose's biggest trump card or it may bring the whole investigation crashing down, and put her own life in danger.

My take

According to booksellers, this new novel has simply flown off the shelves.

Part Australian police procedural, part psychological thriller. A police taskforce is investigating a serial killer who has already killed two young women in their houses close to each other on the banks of the Parramatta River near Sydney. Now a third body is found. But it doesn't follow the pattern set in the first two murders. So is it also the work of BMK? There are some doubts.

By chance an online newspaper The National sends Adam Bowman to the scene, a house in the grounds of a boarding school, as a backup journalist. Adam knows how to avoid the police presence on the gate, because he lived in the grounds when he was a teenager. On a hunch, Adam is used by the investigating team to release select pieces of the investigation, and through him information about the principal and other staff becomes known.

A well constructed and very authentic-feeling novel. An author to be watched.

My rating: 4.6 

About the author

Matthew Spencer was a journalist at The Australian for twenty years, with long stints running the Foreign News desk and as Opinion Editor. He has written for newspapers and magazines in Uganda and Kenya and been published in The Australian Financial Review and The Sydney Morning Herald.

Matthew has an Honours degree in English Literature from the University of Sydney. Black River is his first novel.

He was born in Parramatta. The son of teachers, he lived with his sister Kate on the 320-acre campus of a boys’ boarding school. Long summers on the largely deserted property while exploring the remnant bush with its tributary of the Parramatta River inspired the book.

Black River is published by Allen and Unwin and is out now.

Matthew lives in Sydney with his wife, Ritu Gupta, and their three children.