Mysterious goings-on in the Australian Outback. I loved the overall feel of this book, but the end felt false to me. ( )

'Small towns hide the biggest secrets'. The Australian outback in the 60s. A small boy and a young girl go missing. This is a mystery and a coming-of-age novel but not one that I could get into. I skim-read it and didn't feel that I missed much.

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This book plays in the isolated and quiet town of Angel Rock. Two boys, step-brothers Tom and Flynn, go missing. The town spends over a week searching for them, but looses hope and gives up. Then Tom suddenly turns up again, without his brother; he also does not remember anything about his time away.
A few months later, a girl is found in Sydney, dead because of a suicide. One of the inspectors, Gibson, still haunted by his own sisters suicide decides to dig deeper into the case, especially when it turns out that the girl is from Angle Rock.
With the help of Angel Rock's sherif, "Pop", and his daughter Grace, who was Darcy's best friend, Gibson begins to unearth the local feuds that led up to Darcy's suicide, and ultimately what happened to Tom's brother Flynn. ( )

This is the second novel by Australian author, Darren Williams. "Swimming in Silk", Williams' impressive first novel, won the important Vogel Award.

Williams takes us into the hard, intimate, small-town life of Angel Rock, a town in the desolate outback, surrounded by dense undergrowth and unexplored wilderness. This is a town where money is scarce, old grudges lodge deep and secrets fester. It is a place where the kids still go barefoot to school and the main character, 13-year-old Tom, can still barter chores for his after-school ice block.

Williams relies on atmospheric prose and emerging characterizations to create a human story fraught with tension. Shifting points of view heighten suspense, but it is the adult characters with their hard shells and undercurrents of menace, fear, and uncertainty and the children with their promise and vulnerabilities, that drive the narrative.

Nothing in Angel Rock, either the fictional town or the book, is predictable. Good people have bad moments; bad people have good moments. Everything meshes into a cohesive tale that is, in essence, about family dynamics and their long-term effects both good and bad on children.

This book is exceptional on every level: characterisations, narrative structure, plotting. The characters in particular are so finely wrought that each one, no matter how minor, is very real. Especially appealing are young Tom who is at the heart of this book - a kind and sensitive boy with a great depth of feeling; and Gibson, the detective from Sydney - a man of many sorrows who is none the less capable of gentleness and sympathy. These two characters connect in some way with everyone else in this wonderfully well-told tale of terrible loss and of life in a small Australian town.

Darren Williams is a talented writer, with great insight into human behavior and an understanding of how the smallest kindness to an adult or a child can have a lifetime's impact, and how a misplaced grudge can grow until it obliterates the landscape.

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http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/2610442 ( )