by Ronni Salt
Publisher: Hachette Australia, 2025
Review
by Carol Woeltjes
In the half-light of dawn, Adelaide’s feet pound the path, her breath coming in time with each footfall, her mind free to wander, to find emptiness, but the sign up ahead brings her sharply back to her small-town home. Gunnawah. Pop: 989. Even this early the heat is formidable; she pauses by the lagoon to splash water on her face unaware its murky depths hide a secret.
Heading back into town Adelaide begins our tour of Gunnawah and starts to introduce us to some of its 989 inhabitants. Adelaide shows us the town, and I say shows on purpose, because I felt like I could see it. The descriptions are so vivid I was transported back the 1970s town and surrounding bush and farms. I could hear the cockatoos and smell the rising heat with tinges of manure and freshly baked bread.
Adelaide, our guide and local farm girl, is trying to regain her confidence and find a way out of town after an incident last year. To do this she pushes back against some 1970s sexism and parental expectation and gets a cadetship with the local newspaper, the Gunnawah Gazette. While reporting on a proposed irrigation system Adelaide sees something that doesn’t make sense, and, well you’re going to have to read it to find out what happens next, but shots are fired and lies going back years are uncovered.
As the story unfolded, I come to love some of the characters, the snippets of backstory gave them depth and left me wanting to know more, while other characters had me rolling my eyes and mocking their endearing naiveté.
It’s clear that Ronni Salt hails from a regional area. You can feel it in her writing and the way she depicts the challenges of country life with accuracy and affection. It’s in the home décor, the pub meals, the manners, the guns and the rumour and scuttlebutt. It’s also in the sense of community where everyone pitches in, but whose undertones of grievance are well hidden by the above-mentioned manners.
The way Salt has built the narrative means I felt like part of the town, I had become the 990th inhabitant. So, when things took a turn, I was fully invested and as pieces fell into place, I found myself unwilling to say goodbye. I hope to meet the locals again soon.
Publisher’s blurb
It’s 1974 in the Riverina
The weather is hot
But the body in the Murray River is stone cold . . .
A captivating and compulsive crime thriller about guns, drugs and a young woman dead on the money
When nineteen-year-old farm girl Adelaide Hoffman applies for a cadetship at the Gunnawah Gazette, she sees it as her ticket out of a life too small for her. The paper’s owner, Valdene Bullark, seeing something of the girl she once was in young Adelaide, puts her straight to work.
What starts as a routine assignment covering an irrigation project soon puts Adelaide on the trail of a much bigger story. Water is money in farming communities, and when Adelaide starts asking questions, it’s like she’s poked a bull ant’s nest. Someone will do whatever it takes to stop Adelaide and Val finding out how far the river of corruption and crime runs.
Shady deals. Vested interests. A labyrinth of lies. It seems everyone in Gunnawah has a secret to keep. And too many are already dead quiet.
Set deep in the heart of rural Australia during the era of Gough Whitlam, pub brawls and flared jeans, Gunnawah is a compulsive crime thriller of corruption, guns and drugs from Australian Noir’s most arresting new voice.