Book review: Out in Nowhere by Fleur McDonald

Out in Nowhere by Fleur McDonald is the latest in the loosely linked series featuring Detective Dave Burrows. We met Constable Mia Worth in the previous book in this contemporary series (McDonald has also penned a series featuring a younger Dave Burrows) and she’s front and centre here as well. And her doggedness and sense of unease pays off ensuring a killer doesn’t get away with murders written-off as accidents.

Left alone on the vast cattle station with her baby while her husband, Alex, works the farm, Hallie Donaldson is having trouble adjusting to the flies, dust, snakes and isolation in the Flinders Ranges.

At least today, Hallie knows that she and their daughter Ruby can watch Alex on the security camera erected at the windmill where he'll be working. But something goes horribly wrong and he suddenly disappears from view.

Alex is found later, dead at the bottom of the windmill.

After Alex's death, Hallie discovers an alarming series of phone messages sent to a still-shared link on Alex's phone. A short time later, one of Alex's close friends from agricultural college, Danny Betts, loses his life in another tragic rural accident.

When Hallie reveals the horrifying information she's been keeping secret to Detective Dave Burrows and his partner, Constable Mia Worth, they quickly realise that all is not what it seems.

I feel like it’s been longer than usual between books in this series so I hadn’t remembered a lot about Mia from Broad River Station. It seems like she’ll be around for a while which is nice as some of the Burrows’s previous partners have now moved on.

It occurred to me as this opens that McDonald has a style I’ve come to enjoy and rely on which involves opening the book with a character who becomes central and whose life is upended in some ways. On rare occasions they’re the victim, but here we’re introduced to Hallie, a fashion writer/blogger/podcaster who moved to the outback with her husband and is still trying to adapt to life in the country with their toddler and her over-bearing and domineering in-laws.

McDonald knows rural life well and always seamlessly underpins her plots with some farming-related theme which has involved everything from stock control to organic farming and the threat of pesticides, changes to farming technology and here she digs into the lengths landowners will go to to protect their legacies from ‘blow-ins’ including those (women) who marry into the family. The traditional role woman are forced to play in some outback families also rears its ugly head here.

It’s that slightly tense relationship between Alex and his parents because of their attitude to Hallie that initially has Mia questioning whether his death really was an accident, when a second accidental death seems far too coincidental. Adding to the intrigue here is a past incident that the victims and their close-knit friends from agricultural college have tried to put behind them.

It’s these factors that make this a really enjoyable read and a complex, but not complicated mystery to unravel. I should mention in the background here Dave’s previous life (which features in the ‘young’ Dave Burrows books) is revisited when his estranged daughter makes contact and I’m keen to see how and when the present meets the past.

Out in Nowhere by Fleur McDonald will be published in Australia by Allen & Unwin in late October 2024.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes.