Day's End

Hirsch’s rural beat is wide. Daybreak to day’s end, dirt roads and dust. Every problem that besets small towns and isolated properties, from unlicensed driving to arson. In the time of the virus, Hirsch is seeing stresses heightened and social divisions cracking wide open. His own tolerance under strain; people getting close to the edge.

Today he’s driving an international visitor around: Janne Van Sant, whose backpacker son went missing while the borders were closed. They’re checking out his last photo site, his last employer. A feeling that the stories don’t quite add up.

Then a call comes in: a roadside fire. Nothing much—a suitcase soaked in diesel and set alight. But two noteworthy facts emerge. Janne knows more than Hirsch about forensic evidence. And the body in the suitcase is not her son’s.

‘Disher is a master at controlling his material, taking his readers along the dusty, rutted roads that always pop up when we expect bitumen smoothness. But it’s a journey worth taking, for the pure joy of the writing.’ Herald Sun

‘Day’s End, with its complex plot and empathetic policeman, is crime fiction at its best…culminat[ing] in an ending that took this reader’s breath away.’ Canberra Times