ANNA CREER reviews two crime fiction stories from the popular sub-genre of police procedural novels.

Police procedural novels, a popular sub-genre of crime fiction, focus on the realistic details of a police investigation, including the gathering of evidence, forensic analysis and interviewing suspects.

Australian authors Michael Rowbotham and Matthew Spencer, in their acknowledgements, thank members of the police force for ensuring the accuracy of the fictional investigations in their recent novels. 

Robotham, in a career spanning 20 years, is the only Australian author to have twice won the UK Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel, as well as the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for When She was Good (2020). 

Robotham’s latest crime novel The White Crow (Hachette) is the second in a new series featuring Philomena McCarthy (Phil), a PC in the Met, following When You are Mine (2021). 

Phil is a dedicated policewoman who hopes one day to be a detective, but there’s a complication. Her father is Edward McCarthy and her uncles are the McCarthy Brothers. Together they were the most notorious criminal gang in the south-east of England. Now, however, they consider themselves property developers and “facilitators”. As a result, Phil walks a fine line between her career and her family’s criminal activities. 

On night patrol, Phil finds a small child, Daisy Kemp-Lowe, in pyjamas walking alone. When she takes her home she finds evidence of a home invasion and Daisy’s mother dead. 

At the same time, five kilometres away, Detective Chief Inspector Brendan Keegan arrives at a jewellers in Hatton Garden, which has been burgled, with the terrified owner Russell Kemp-Lowe tied to a chair in an explosive vest. 

He tells Keegan the intruders have his wife hostage not realising his wife, Daisy’s mother, has been murdered. 

Keegan becomes convinced that the McCarthys are behind the home invasion and the robbery of the jewellery shop. However, the McCarthy’s have their own problems, with vandals targeting their building sites and the bank foreclosing on loans. Another gang is trying to take over. Robotham has said that he intended When You are Mine to be standalone but he “fell in love with Phil and in particular with her father and uncles, who were old-school East End gangsters. Geezers, if you will, who made me laugh”. 

But there’s little to laugh at in The White Crow. It’s a violent, tense and thrilling exploration of a world none of us will thankfully ever know.

MATTHEW Spencer made an impressive debut in the world of crime writing with Black River (2022 ), which won the Danger Award for Debut Crime Fiction and was shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Award for Best Debut Crime Fiction. 

In Black River, Spencer introduced homicide detective Sergeant Rose Riley and, in a story set in a private boy’s school on the Parramatta River, how she worked successfully with a journalist, Adam Bowman, to reveal hidden secrets and catch a killer. 

Riley and Bowman return in Broke Road (Allen and Unwin), set in the Hunter Valley where a young woman, Penelope Armytage, has been found murdered in her home in Red Creek, near Polkobin. 

The forensic pathologist tells Riley that the woman has been strangled but there’s no sign of a forced entry, no evidence of restraint or of rape. Her husband, a geologist, was interstate, discovering her body when he returned. 

However, the media began to focus on the husband. Riley knows that “she had Bowman if she needed to hit back… Bowman was a friend and they worked well together, combat bonded, and she could trust him in the same way she trusted Patel”, her police colleague.

Bowman is already on his way to Red Creek. He had written a book about Riley and the school murders and the royalties “had brought him autonomy and a different kind of life”. He is now freelance and that means he is constantly searching for a story. 

The Red Creek district is in the middle of a tourist and development boom centred around the growing number of vineyards. Penelope owned a digital marketing company and had contracts with a number of the local winemakers. 

The investigation fails to find a motive for the murder until an interstate search reveals two similar unsolved cases and Riley realises she and her team are pursuing a serial killer. 

Broke Road is tense, vivid and realistic. The media frenzy, the rumours and hostility in the pub and the determination of Riley and local police to follow the few clues they have to track the killer combine in an addictive read.