"Truth" by Peter Temple

An audio book. Set in Australia. Heat wave, drought. Bush fires.

Inspector Steve Volani has no degree, 2 daughters, a son, and a casual relationship with Anna, a TV politics presenter. His wife is Laury. He thinks his job messed up his family life. Inspector Singo/Singleton was his predecessor.

His father, Bob, an ex-soldier, has stables by his house. "Truth" was one of his father's race-horses. It died suddenly. When Steve was 14 they planted a wood - many species of oaks, and eucalyptus. His mother left the family because of mental problems. He was the oldest of 3 sons and looked after them. He had/has a brother Luke. His other brother, Mark, is a doctor who still lives locally. They don't get on. Steve suspects he might be friends with bad people.

Colleagues are Kierly (wants to be number 2?), Dove (shot in a previous caper - "in the main, cops hurt this badly you never saw about unless you went to visit them in retirement, bloated, semi-drunk, on anti-depressants, sleeping pills, they often took to smoking dope, they had the stupified look, wife always angry, shouting at them, at someone on the phone, the fat little dog on the chair farting". Dove returned in 11 weeks) and Webber (christian). There's also Dance (Crucible?) - narcotics? - and Commissioner Barry.

Searle who works for the media pesters him. Elections are coming up and law-keeping is an issue. There are crimes -

• A young naked woman (no ID) was found dead and naked in a luxury apartment on the 36th of Prosilio. The owners want no publicity - the security systems malfunctioned. Security company Stiliko is part-owned by an ex-cop.
• 3 male bodies (1 shot, 2 hung/mutilated) found in a shed behind a house in Oakley. Croatians. Drug gangs?

Lizzie, his 15 y.o. daughter, has disappeared. She's taken money from the house. Volani gets his colleagues to look for her. Meanwhile 2 suspects (one an ex-cop) for the Oakley murders are under surveillance. In the night they escape to their car, crashing to their death on the freeway. Volani is blamed.

Mark, his brother, is accused of treating criminals off the record.

Old Rose Quirk is a sort-of adopted gran. Later we learn that he feels guilt because at the inquest about her son's death he was economical with the truth.

He moves out of the family. It's been tense for a long time. Both have been unfaithful. A colleague offers him his sister's flat.

On a hunch about the Prosilio case he interviews and pressurises a minister. The hunch is mistaken. A minister suggests that his likely promotion will be jeopardised unless he eases off investigating the other minister. He's offered by job by Siliko. The minister resigns later.

Lizzie is found amongst homeless druggies. She claims that her father sexually molested her. She escapes from the authorities. Somehow the media find out about her claims. Searle phones Volani to say that he'll get the story blocked. Laury gets a call from Lizzie saying that "they" told her to lie about her father. Hours later she's found dead - O.D. - at the end of an alley.

Rose Quirk dies. There'd been talk that the case involving her son getting shot(?) and Volani might be re-opened. Now she's dead that won't happen.

At the end the worst baddy shoots himself after telling Volani everything. There's a prostitute/immigrant racket going on. Volani get himself helicoptered to his father's place to help him survive the fire. Finally there are some promotions.

Many names, events and much jargon is unexplained initially. Several flashbacks fill in the back story that I summarised above. The author uses chains of clauses where only the first mentions their shared subject - "Volani went to the fence, followed it for 5 or 6 metres, turned back, ...".

Other reviews

• Edmund Gordon (he eschews the staccato prose rhythms that typify the genre, opting instead for long sentences that do their work over several clauses, blooming and shrinking, and achieving strange, impressionistic effects. His dialogue is entirely distinctive, full of the mangled poetry and beautiful solecisms of ordinary speech. ... For all Temple's mastery of style, for all his clarity of thought and subtlety of characterisation, in the end his new novel lacks that essential quality, the impression of truth.)
• Petrona
• Jesse Kornbluth (His books are thrillers with violent crimes as the problem to be solved and cops as the characters who must solve. In our country, that’s the province of genre specialists like Patricia Cornwell and James Patterson —- writers who favor simple plots, cardboard dialogue and lots of white space on the page. Temple, in comparison, is Dostoevsky.)