Customer Reviews

Moonlight Downs

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The author, Adrian Hyland, spent many years living and working with indigenous people in the Northern Territory; MOONLIGHT DOWNS is a story told with a great deal of affection for the people. Their spiritual connection to the land and its native animals is particularly well described. He makes no attempt to gloss over the dysfunctional aspects of life in the remoter areas of the Northern Territory, both European and Aboriginal.Emily regards her community with a mixture of deep love and exasperation at the destructiveness of some of the behaviour she witnesses.

There are other issues raised in the book. The inevitable clash of cultures and lack of understanding that results. Conflicting interests of farming, mining and aboriginal land claims, the politicization of these interests and the odd mix of people who seem to be attracted to such remote areas. The real achievement that Hyland has managed to pull off is the fact that he vividly portrays all these aspects of life in the outback without making any judgements and without trying to push the reader down the path towards a particular opinion. He leaves that entirely up to the individual.

Hyland has also injected a wonderful dry humour into the book. Expressions such as "rough as emus knees", "he belonged to the von Ribbentrop school of negotiation" and "been taking deportment lessons from a Rottweiler" are genuinely funny. The author also has a gift for description; " Gladys herself was a battleship on stilts. She wasn't much older than me, but she'd exploded in every direction. She was immensely tall, immensely fat, wearing a green dress and a coiffure that looked like it had been fashioned with a splitting axe."

"Moonlight Downs" is surely one of the more unusual mystery novels out there right now in that it is set in the wasteland of northern Australia, features a female sleuth who is half Aboriginal and half European and uses a lexicon of Australian English and Aboriginal expressions that will be completely unfamiliar to most non-Australian readers.

Author Adrian Hyland has fashioned a complex mystery story that does not sort itself until the final pages of the book. Meanwhile, protagonist Emily Tempest, travels many miles through the outback trying to find the murderer of an old family friend who was the revered leader of a small Aboriginal band trying to reestablish its traditional way of life in a wasteland oasis. The problems that Aboriginal people have living between European settlements and traditional encampments are well and sympathetically laid out as the story line uncoils.

The author thankfully provides a glossary of Aboriginal and Australian words and idioms at the outset of the book and be forewarned--you will have to access those references frequently until well into the book. This is an intelligent and interesting novel with a good mystery core that any reader of the genre will appreciate greatly.

Finally, kudos to SOHO Crime for continuing to delivery excellent international mysteries to the American market.

(4.5 stars) Part white and part aborigine, Emily Tempest has "a foot in both camps." As a child living with the aborigines at Moonlight Downs while her white father worked at the Moonlight cattle station, Emily was a happy member of the community until she was fourteen, when her natural curiosity and tempestuous nature led her to violate a strong community taboo. Immediately, she was sent off to boarding school in Adelaide, her best friend, and partner in the violation, an aborigine, facing a worse penalty within the community. After starting three degrees (including law) and finishing none, she traveled the world, eventually finding her way back "home" for the first time in twelve years, just as Lincoln Flinders, the father of her best friend and the leader of the community, is found murdered. There is no dearth of motives.

The aborigine community has recently had its ancestral lands restored by the Australian courts after whites had appropriated it for cattle grazing and development, and resentful whites have been trying to buy or lease it back. Racial tensions and cultural conflicts underlie intercommunity relationships, and some of the aborigines' most sacred sites have been deliberately destroyed by whites. Aborigine youth who have lived in Bluebush, the nearest community, no longer feel the ties to the land that their parents and ancestors have had, and the community's future is threatened. Emily Tempest is determined to find out who murdered Lincoln Flinders, and she is in a unique position to do so, but she also has her enemies, both inside and outside the aborigine community.

Australian author Adrian Hyland, who won the Ned Kelly Award for this atmospheric and dramatic first novel, creates a narrative that moves at warp speed, filled with action and excitement. At the same time, he also invites contemplation of the natural world and the lives of the aborigines who identify with nature on a visceral, even mystical, level. Their needs are basic, their lives are not pretty, and their land is infertile, making their ability to be happy because of their culture and beliefs significant by contrast.

Hyland's dialogue is earthy, filled with aborigine and white slang (for which there is a glossary in the front), and he is often profane, preferring to show his characters and their lives as they really are, instead of the way an "overcivilized" reader might wish them to be. His remarkable ability to recreate the seemingly bleak North Australian landscape and the people who consider it "home" puts the reader in touch with life's most basic needs and the aborigine culture which has developed there. Despite its movie script ending, this unusual and captivating mystery, the first in a projected series, is one of my favorites for the year. n Mary Whipple

Daisy Bates in the Desert, a white woman's life among the aborigines
Sorry by Gail Jones, set in W. Australian bush

Set in the outback of Australia, this is the first in a series featuring Emily Tempest, the 26-year-old daughter of a whitefeller miner and an Aboriginal woman. Emily returns to the outback after several years meandering around, trying various university courses, and still not sure what to do with her life. Since her mother died young, she spent much of her time growing up in Moonlight Downs, the blackfeller settlement in the outback, but she doesn't feel totally a part of either the white or the black community.

Returning now, she almost feels like she's home, but the feeling is shattered when the elderly head of the settlement who was like a second father to her, is brutally murdered just a couple of days later. Emily is crushed as the community scatters, most back to the town of Bluebush, a scrubby settlement full of rough-living folks with no redeeming qualities. But there Emily ends up too, working in a menial job and living in a tiny, squalid apartment, as she has basically nowhere else to go. Lincoln's daughter Hazel, Emily's best friend, has gone off to do her grieving the aboriginal way. Emily puzzles over who could have killed Lincoln--was it Blakie, the wild, crazed witchdoctor who lived in the bush? Earl Marsh, a cattle baron set on buying up neighboring property? Or someone else? Emily feels like the police aren't too interested in finding the truth so begins poking her nose in and gets herself into some sticky situations along the way.

All I can say is....WOW! What an awesome book! The author did such a great job with Emily's character, the cultural immersion, and the outback itself as a main character in the story. The racial tensions and societal norms were treated matter-of-factly and neither glossed over nor played up--they just WERE. I learned so much, and had no idea at the time that I was being educated--the book was a total pleasure read! I have to admit that I did spot the bad guy as soon as he was introduced, at least was pretty sure it was him, but that in no way diminished my enjoyment of the book. I am so glad I've got the second in the series on the way to me, as I know it won't be long before I get to it.

If this isn't among my top ten reads of the year, I'll eat my shorts.

Great book about Australia, first of, hopefully, many by Adrian Hyland featuring Emily Tempest. Emily, half-aboriginal, returns to where she grew up and encounters a mystery. Extraordinarily complex but readable, exciting as well as informative -- this story really opens up Central Australia. Given the uneasy coexistence between indigenous natives and white settlers, territorial disputes over lands involving need for water versus spiritual importance of location, this landscape bears a more than passing resemblance to the American Wild West. The town of Bluebush even sounds like a modern day Deadwood.

When I finished this book, I was speechless. I was smiling. I was in awe. And I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to do what I'd just read justice in a review. I'm going to give it a shot anyway.

After years of traveling the world, Emily Tempest, half-Aborigine, half-white, has returned to Moonlight, the community in the desert of Northern Australia where she grew up. Within hours of her arrival, respected community leader Lincoln Flinders' body is found, and all signs point to an Aboriginal sorcerer as his murderer. With the help of the police, Emily is determined to find Lincoln's killer, for the dead man held a very special place in her heart:

"And how had Lincoln drawn me into this world? By stories. Stories and songs. With Lincoln a journey of any description was a rolling dialogue with the country. A track by a waterhole or an unusual rock, a tree shaped like a woman or a circle of stones, the subtlest change in the landscape, any of these things was enough to get him going: he'd tell you the tale of the ancestral beings that had made it, the songs they'd sung, the paths they'd carved in the Dreaming. For a wide-eyed five-year-old he'd made the country come alive."



Although the mystery is intriguing, and the bad guy slips deliciously into the picture at the end, the strength of this book lies in its characters and its depiction of the landscape and its people. Hyland's language is earthy, sometimes profane, and often very funny. Fortunately for many of us there are glossaries in the front of the book which decipher the slang. (I made regular use of them at the beginning.) Hyland portrays the life of these people as it really is. He doesn't use politically correct euphemisms; he doesn't try to sugarcoat anything, and the book is all the more powerful for it.

Emily is such an in-your-face creature. Her ambivalence about the aboriginal and white worlds that she's a part of is a strong theme in this novel. She makes me laugh. She certainly doesn't mince her words. She doesn't know the meaning of the word "quit". She's just the type of character I want to read more about.

After reading Moonlight Downs, not only did I feel supremely entertained, but I felt as though I knew a bit more about a totally different culture thousands of miles away from my comfortable home in metropolitan Phoenix. Without doubt, Adrian Hyland's book will be one of my top reads this year.

"Given a Wantiya mother, a knockabout miner father and a Warlpuju foster mob, it wasn't exactly surprising that I often thought of geological formations as having lives of their own. I imagined them as enormous creatures, crawling through time..." That's Emily Tempest thinking to herself. She's a small, clever, confident and often headstrong young woman who is about to find herself hunted down by murderers in the bleak, dry Australian outback. To her sometimes confusion, she and those who know her usually think of her as a black woman misplaced in a white world or as a white woman misplaced in a black world. She's as much at home in both as she's not at home in either. When she decides to visit the extended family group she grew up with, who now have been given official title to their ancestral land, the Moonlight Downs, she finds herself at cross purposes with just about everyone she knows or meets. There are the people -- the Moonlight mob -- she ran with as a child while her father worked. They include probably the two most important people in her life...Lincoln Flinders, the aging leader of the Moonlight mob, and his daughter, Hazel. Then there are the whitefellers, especially those who center around Bluebush, the nearest town to Moonlight. Bluebush is one of the worst Australian outback towns you'll hope never to be stuck in...drunks, cast-offs, opportunists, manipulative government officials and up-from-the-bootstraps bullies. Some are pleasant enough, some aren't. Some are wealthy landowners, most are not.

When Lincoln Flinders is found dead, killed in a gruesome manner that might make some think the murderer is a blackfeller, Emily decides it couldn't have been that way. Her decision to investigate is complicated by the plans some of the whites in Bluebush have to develop Moonlight Downs whether the aboriginal owners like it or not. Emily eventually figures things out, but not before the author, Adrian Hyland, has given us a straightforward and engrossing look at life in the outback, both among the aboriginal groups and the whites. He manages this with clear and even evocative language that doesn't fall back on poetic descriptions of aboriginal life or rugged outback beauty. Dreams and Diamond Doves play a part, but with a casual and unromantic acceptance of how people believe in things.

Adrian Hyland is a first-rate writer. He brings us into Emily Tempest's life and times with a minimum of fuss. His descriptions are vivid but restrained. This works because he knows what he's talking about and because he knows how to create characters we can imagine for ourselves. Emily Tempest, somewhere in her late twenties, has been drifting around for several years. She drinks, she rolls her own and her mouth sparks out with casual obscenities. She knows how to live in the bush, identify rocks and how to keep drunks in line while she serves booze at her temporary job in town. She can take care of herself. She's also thoughtful, sometimes impetuous and likes to read. Her bonded relationship with Hazel Flinders is complex.

As much as Moonlight Downs is a fascinating look at outback life amongst the blackfellers and the whitefellers, and as much as Hyland has created an intriguing lead character in Emily Tempest, more than anything else Hyland has written a fine mystery. You need to pay attention while reading this book. There's a lot going on with more than one or two plausible theories behind the murder of Lincoln Flinders. And Hyland keeps the plot honest. Most of what we learn either drives to the solution or creates reasonable alternatives. As with enjoying any good mystery, it pays to be a bit suspicious of reasonable explanations. Hyland also handles the need for a solid flash finish. The last six fairly short chapters place Emily and then Emily and Hazel in the middle of brutal killings, mistaken assumptions, desperate chases and a stand-up resolve by Emily not to give the killer an ounce of satisfaction...all in the heat and rocky outcrops of the outback. It's quite a scene, and leads to an entirely satisfying conclusion. I'm looking forward to Emily Tempest's next appearance.

After several years of seeing the world, half-aboriginal Emily Tempest returns home to the Moonlight Downs camp in Australia's Outback. Emily struggles to readapt to living in the "Blackfeller" camp, but is getting there thanks in part due to a warm welcome home from her friend Lincoln Flinders although his daughter, her former best friend Hazel, makes her feel like an outsider.

She is stunned when Lincoln is found dead, a strangulation victim. Even more shocking is the killer carved out his kidney. The locals assume sorcerer Blakie Japanangka murdered and then mutilated the body of the camp's leader. Emily assists police sergeant Tom McGillivray in trying to find Blakie, who has vanished. When information surfaces that makes the prime suspect look innocent, Emily looks into a land dispute as the motive for killing Lincoln with the organ removal used to throw blame on the aborigine sorcerer.

This is an interesting look at the aborigine culture from the perspective of a person who had one foot in that and one in the white Australian society before she became a globetrotter. Emily is the strength of the story line as her relationship with Hazel seems to be a microcosm of the two groups. Although the whodunit especially when it detours into an avarice land deal seems a stretch and lacks suspense, readers will enjoy this insightful visit to the Outback.

Harriet Klausner

I treasure a book that takes me into a new time, place, or culture and this one plunked me down in the Australian Outback with Emily Tempest and the Moonlight mob. The underlying mystery was just gravy on the roast.
Descriptions were sometimes dense and once or twice I had to work a little to untangle the lingo by referring to the glossary in the front of the book, but it was well worth it.

First Sentence: I parked my little white ute on the outskirts of the camp and sat there, looking out at the scatter of corrugated iron hovels.

Emily Tempest has traveled Australia and the world, only to return to return to the community where she grew up; Moonlight Downs. Shortly after her return, the beloved leader of the community is brutally murdered. The obvious suspect is the half-crazed aboriginal, Blackie. But is the obvious suspect too obvious.

It is not easy for an author to write cross-gender; Hyland does so brilliantly. Emily is a fascinating character; strong, independent and trying to find her way home. With her being bi-cultural, aboriginal and white, she is the conduit through which we see a culture completely different from our own and the conflicts which exist between them. However, you are given a sense of the culture without bludgeoning you with it. It's not a diatribe, but shows how the present draws reference from the past in a very good story of the here and now.

Hyland has wonderful voice and use of language..."She was wearing a white cotton dress, beneath which the contours of her body flowed as smoothly as the country songs they sometimes sing out here". I loved the reference to Emily and her friend, Hazel, coming across a trove of classic literature..."the collection in front of us was something else. ... They were the planet itself." The use of wry humor provides a lightening tone to the subject of the book..."I took another look at their transport,... It looked like something the Haps had dropped on Darwin." Happily, he provided a glossary of terms, however it is fairly easy to glean the meaning of unfamiliar words just from their context.

Not only does Hyland establish a strong sense of place, but he very effectively conveys a feeling of threat and danger.

Sometimes it's obvious to see why award-winning books are just that. Such is the case here. There was a 3-year gap, but I'm anxious to read the next book in the Emily Tempest series.

MOONLIGHT DOWNS (Ama Sleuth-Emily Tempest-Australia-Cont) - VG+
Hyland, Adrian - 1st in series
Soho, 2006, US Hardcover - ISBN: 978156474839