In the last Emily Tempest installment, Emily had just returned to the Outback. When we catch up to her in Gunshot Road, she has settled in as a Aboriginal Community Police Officer (ACPO) for the Bluebush police department. Only half the uniform fits her and she is "allergic to authority" so the job isn't sitting with her as comfortably as she (and others) would like. To top it off, her superior is a by-the-book replacement by the name of Bruce Cockburn. Cockburn is filling in for Emily's old friend, Tom MacGillivray while Tom is hospitalized. Unfortunately, Bruce doesn't get Emily at all. All the barriers are there; the biggest being gender. As a female investigator she isn't taken seriously. Being biracial doesn't help either. Her very first case is a murder investigation at the Green Swamp Well Roadhouse and she has very little support during the investigation. Par for the course, someone is covering up something much bigger.
As an aside, Emily is someone I could kick back with and enjoy a beer. I admire her smart, funny, and courageous attitude. I do not, however, believe she could fire a shotgun with her big toe while wrestling, with her hands tied, with a 200lb+ brute. As you can probably tell, there is a lot of violence in Hyland novels.
Best part of Gunshot Road: Emily's best friend, Hazel, and boyfriend, Jojo, are back. Yes! ( )

Started with the second book in the series - again! - and panicked when the male author described the female character's breasts on page two, but Emily's narrative voice and the crazy outback lifestyle of a part-Aboriginal police liaison officer soon won me over. Adrian Hyland has created a detective gem in Emily Tempest, and I'm definitely going to read the first novel, Diamond Dove.

I looked out the window onto the sad, sunblasted streets of Bluebrush. Not much to see. A dog struggled against the tide of heat, tongue lolling; it bunched up, dropped a jobbie on the pavement. A mad-looking fellow in lycra jogged past. Walked past, if strictly truthful, but moving as if he meant it. Poncing down the road like he had a duck shoved up his arse.'

This is the portrait of a small town in the Northern Territory of Australia which captured my imagination, and in Emily's wonderfully droll voice. She has been drafted into the police as a liaison officer after proving her amateur detective prowess in the first novel - I presume! - but soon starts pushing boundaries - and her boss' buttons - when an eccentric old geologist, and family friend, is murdered. What had old Doc found out about the land that got him killed?

I grew to love Emily, even when she pointedly walked into a dangerous situation like a teenage girl from a 1970s horror film. She's plain-spoken, like all the best Aussie characters, and a great mix of Aboriginal mysticism and outback hardiness. The other characters are equally likeable, apart from the 'bad guys' of course!

The plot kept me reading, but I can't tell if I predicted the 'whydunit' or was just slightly disappointed. Either way, this book is definitely character- and location-led, so I didn't mind spending 400 pages with Emily. Back to book one! ( )

This is a story of many things, of murder, of hate, of greed and of violence all told over the haunting music of the outback, deep in the heart of Australia. It begins when Emily Tempest of a Young Man’s Time ceremony where she is joining with the women of the group in their song.
'You could imagine those great song cycles rolling across country, taking their shape from what they encountered scraps of language, minerals and dreams, a hawk’s flight, a feather’s fall, the flash of a meteorite.'

Emily Tempest is just back from training and is to start as Aboriginal Community Police Officer for her outback township Bluebush. This will be an odd job for Emily for although she is well educated, intelligent and part of the community she has always resisted authority herself. But she has a sense of the rhythms of her people and can see below the surface of the obvious problems of alcohol, prejudice, poverty and now drugs. One of her problems will be her new boss who is new to the territory and a by the book kind of man named Sergeant Cockburn.


Before her first day is over there is the murder of an old geologist who was getting a little crazy and a friend of his is arrested. Knowing the men Emily can’t accept the pat verdict that the rest of the force is eager to swallow to settle the case. The old man Doc as he was known had been surveying the Fuego Desert. He had traversed it from east to west and mapped it completely including ranges, ridges glaciers and water fields.

Emily convinces Sergeant Cockburn to let her take a trip out there. Along with her against regulations she takes along people who know the area well. She meets one old man called Eli Windmill. The specific area that is headed to is Eli’s dreaming. It is called Dingo Springs and Eli called it a fire-dreaming place.

Windmill is blind but when the party gets to Dingo springs Eli knows something is terribly wrong. Other members of the tribe also can sense some thing wrong and they leave immediately. The difficulty is this is all too vague for Emily to bring to Cockburn. Now however there are attempts being made on Emily’s life and the violence escalates Emily’s wits are all that help her because she has a tendency to tackle everything on her own.

I liked this book and the first of the series Moonlight Downs AKA Diamond Dove very much.
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Emily Tempest has become the world’s most unlikely cop, an Aboriginal Community Police Officer no less. On her first day on the job in Bluebush in the Northern Territory she is one of the officers called to the scene of a stabbing out at Green Swamp Well. On the surface it looks like an open and shut case: two old drunks got into a fight and one stabbed the other in the neck. But to Emily, who knows both the victim (Doc) and the suspect (Wireless), something doesn’t feel right and she can’t let the investigation slide.

Gunshot Road has it all. Literally. Everything I could possibly want from a work of fiction all in one gorgeous package.

First there are fantastic characters. Emily Tempest is brave and stubborn and smart and funny and, as was the case with the first book in which she features, I’m still not entirely sure how a bloke can create such a credible female character but I’m delighted he has. In this book she is more mature than in her first outing though she still struggles when she knows what she should do is not what she wants to do and usually her heart wins out over her head. For better or worse.

There are plenty of other beautifully depicted characters to look out for too. Like the teenage Aboriginal boy called Danny who is deeply troubled by something and unable to communicate his fears to Emily. And the town’s new top cop, taciturn and uncomprehending of all the things he doesn’t know, but trying to do the right thing in his way. And of course the setting, the harsh land in the country’s centre, is just as much a character as any person in the book.

The desert isolation, the unrelenting heat, the laconic humour, the often awkward relationships between blacks and whites all combine to form an unmistakably Australian story. It’s not always a pretty one though and no one could accuse Hyland of trying to make it so because he tackles touch subjects such as the rampant domestic abuse of women in Aboriginal communities, endemic poverty and racism. However he somehow manages to do it without once lecturing from a self-proclaimed moral high ground. That’s a much rarer trait than it ought to be in modern literature.

Next there is writing that made me simultaneously jealous at someone else’s ability to string words together in a way that I will never be able to and grateful that he didn’t keep his gift to himself. This is from the opening chapter about an initiation

The town mob: fractured and deracinated they might have been, torn apart by idleness and violence, by Hollywood and booze. But moments like these, when people come together, when they try to recover the core, they gave you hope.

It was the songs that did it: the women didn’t so much sing them as pick them up like radio receivers. You could imagine those great song cycles rolling across country, taking their shape from what they encountered: scraps of language, minerals and dreams, a hawk’s flight, a feather’s fall, the flash of a meteorite.

The resonance of that music is everywhere, even here, on the outskirts of the whitefeller town, out among the rubbish dumps and truck yards. It sings along the wires, it rings off bitumen and steel.

I could go on but I’d end up quoting the whole book. In short, Hyland’s writing is a thing of beauty and the entire book is, in part, one long ode to its country.

Finally there is a great story and Gunshot Road is a more solid piece of crime fiction than its predecessor. For the first half of the novel there’s a fairly slow, humorous approach to the investigation as we’re introduced to all the players and people tease Emily about her new obsession. Then at a certain point the novel switches gears and speeds up as it becomes more serious and foreboding. Together these halves make up a perfectly paced story with a genuine nail-biting finish.

Heck the book even incorporates, glorifies actually, geology, my favourite science. What more could I possibly ask for? Gunshot Road is a funny, beautiful, sad and thoughtful book that everyone should read. Immediately. ( )

2nd in a series by Hyland an Australian author. Emily Tempest is a biracial Australian hired as a police officer go between in the Australian outback. This is a rough, gritty area and a rough, gritty novel. I didn't enjoy the dangerous situations she put herself in and definitely did not enjoy the magical element near the end for which there was no warning of. Read for a reading group and won't be continuing any other in the series. I did enjoy the description of the Australian land. ( )