Never Never Book Review: Harriet Blue invades the Outback

What is this about?: Harry, AKA Detective Harriet Blue, is sent to a mine in the Outback to investigate a murder. Saddled with a partner she’s suspicious about and family drama she’s forced to hide out from, Harry tries to find a killer who like hunting for prey.

What else is this about?: Harry and Sam. The book establishes that Sam is in trouble, big time, to the point that Harry has to hide out from the media while her colleagues investigate her brother for murder, and as a consequence herself. The book is, to me at least, setting the groundwork about their childhood and who they are for book 2. Which is going to be so good. SO GOOD.

Stars: 4/5

Should you read: Oh hell yes. It’s a fast-paced slick beginning, with a main character that is as frustrating as she is compelling.

Blurb: When Sydney police department sex crimes detective Harriet Blue is called into her boss’s office, she never imagined it would be to tell her that her brother is the prime suspect in the brutal murders of three women.

Shocked and in denial, Harry is transferred to Perth to avoid the media exposure this case will attract. Harry is sent into the outback – the never never – to investigate the disappearance of mine worker Danny Carter. The mining town is a seedy place, full of money and immoral ways to spend it. As Harry delves deeper into the murky lives of these miners, she finds that Danny isn’t the first to go missing.

Never Never is the first in the Detective Harriet Blue series, and a work co-authored by award-winning Australian author Candice Fox and James Patterson. I might’ve squealed out loud when I heard they were working together. Ahem. Don’t judge. It happens.

Never Never opens in the Outback, with The Soldier making a dire promise to a young man about to run for his life: make it to the camp and he’ll live. From that point on, the book never lets up, using the Outback, and the location of a mining camp to amp up the tension for the characters, or rather the victims in The Soldier’s game.

And into all this comes Harry Blue, somewhat like a fox in a hen house. She is a Sydney detective, sent to investigate a murder at the mine, but in essence, her boss wants her out of the way. Her brother Sam has just been arrested as the Georges River (serial) Killer and her boss, Pops, is trying to keep her away from the media and the unsympathetic gaze of the cops around her — after all, how could a detective miss the signs her brother was a killer? Sort of the same question people ask the wives of husbands unmasked as killers too.

Harry goes because, I think, she’s still dealing with the shock of the revelation about Sam and that her fellow cops are building a solid case against him. That guilt — Sam’s and her own — are a constant presence in the book, always keeping her just off balance — just enough to make her lose her temper quickly, for example. Granted, the book is also peppered with just enough of the right kind of information about her and Sam’s past too that gives you a picture of their childhood and her temper. All in all, this all works together to culminate superbly in a set-up for the next book, which is what I hope the ending promised. By the time the last scene closed, I realised Never Never was an excellent set-up for book 2 and a deeper look at Sam and Harry, and I didn’t even realise it was happening.

But, I’m jumping ahead of myself: let’s go back to the mine. Harry and her partner — that she didn’t expect — Whitt are thrown together to investigate what turns out to be the deaths of four people, a mining company that is hampering them at every turn and far too many suspects.

There are red herrings of course, solidly built, because there was a time or two that I turned the page and went WTF. Pacing is superb, and like I mentioned the setting and the location of the mine heighten the danger she and Whitt are in. And all of this revolves around The Soldier, who is picking his victims off one by one with a sniper rifle, and this includes Harry and Whitt at one point. Or two points.

The other interesting thing about this book is the look at life in the line, of Fly In Fly Out workers. It’s hard work, backbreaking and work that can be filled with a healthy dose of fear and claustrophobia when there’s nowhere else to go. The book plays on all these elements expertly and, it’s just simply riveting. I want more. And I have to wait. Dammit.

There is a long cast of secondary characters, some whom I wish I knew more about, but I can’t say what I did find wasn’t brilliantly done. That said, I wanted to know more about Whitt, her partner in this book, but this book is about Harry. Hopefully, we can see them work together and learn more about him in book 2, but I have to admit, that could go either way.

However, characterisation and plot work seamlesslessly, and along with pacing, I don’t even know how I got to chapter 115. I didn’t feel a thing and the next thing I knew it was over!

This is the beginning to a superb partnership and Harriet Blue a brilliant, broken and tough main character. I sympathise with her, egged her on in losing her temper with some characters in the book and never regretted it. She’s a complicated result of her background and I cannot wait to learn more about her in Book 2.

What do you think about Harry and Never Never? Do you think it’s a thriller you might read?

Never Never is out now.