Cold River

We first met Senior Constable Sally White, a police officer at Edenville, a small town in the Victorian High Country, in the novel, The Creeper, by Margaret Hickey. She had recently returned to work when the police were alerted that a young hiker was missing. Search parties were immediately arranged with little success. 

Then one morning Sally finds a woman waiting for her to open the police station. She is there with enquiries about her daughter, Astrid, who had disappeared when skiing in the mountains two years earlier. Were the police still looking for her daughter? Sally adds this cold case to her list of investigations. Could they be connected.

In Cold River, Margaret Hickey provides the reader with another fast paced tension driven crime novel with a range of dubious characters living in a sometimes dangerous environment. As Sally tries to find what happened to the missing people she uncovers a secret in part of the local community where money is made from chop chop, the illegal growing and selling of tobacco with links to crime gangs. Sally also discovers information that will impact not only the local community but also the police force. She has two choices - to keep the secret or release the information to authorities. The impact of the decision is left to the imagination of the reader.

For readers living in Victoria the setting for the book will bring back memories of the police search  for fugitive, Dezi Freeman, last year.