Hermit

On a winter’s night in rural south Australia, a silent alarm calls police to Jensen’s Store. On arrival they find a man with bloody hands standing over the body of Cassavette, the owner, dead from a stab wound to the heart. The man gives his name as Nathan Whittler, but otherwise remains silent.

Duty detective Dana Russo has 12 hours to question Nathan before he has to be formally charged, at which point he will be appointed legal representation and probably advised not to talk. Dana quickly realises that the case is not straightforward, and that Nathan has a story that should be heard if he can be coaxed into telling it.

The situation calls for extreme delicacy. Nathan is intelligent but his history is one of trauma and isolation: it emerges that for some 15 years Nathan has been living off the grid and surviving with no human contact, and that he has not spoken to anyone for all that time. Great subtlety will be needed to get him to open up.

The relationship between Dana and Nathan is the central focus of the book. Seen from Dana’s perspective, the story progresses through a series of interviews, and her process in deciding when to speak, when to remain silent, when to push and when to let Nathan vent his feelings without pressure.

In one sense, Dana’s task is helped by her own problematic childhood, details of which are released slowly, with part remaining unrevealed even at the end. Parallels between herself and Nathan give her a direction and sensitivity that her colleagues lack. At the same time, she finds this exquisitely painful. By chance, the day in question is the anniversary of key episodes from her past, which she habitually spends by herself to give her demons free rein.

The demands of the case deny her the opportunity to engage with these negative feelings and despite the help of one or two friends, she spends most of the book barely managing to cope. At the same time, Nathan acts as a distraction from her personal problems and she develops a sophisticated strategy to elicit his story, giving him hints of the difficulties that enable her to have such a clear insight.

This is a police procedural, and various lines of investigation are followed up by Dana’s colleagues even though Nathan appears to be clearly the culprit. The other police are surprisingly sympathetic to Dana and her quiet approach given the book’s setting, and unusually professional given the usual representation – however unfair – of the Australian outback. Dana is something special, however: her approach is more like psychotherapy than a police grilling, and the steady stream of revelations produced by her skills unlock an increasingly gripping story.