By Patricia Wolf
Publisher: Echo Publishing, 2024
Publisher’s blurb
A small mining community. A murderer at large. And a flood that has trapped them all.
DS Lucas Walker is off duty. His young half-sister Grace is visiting from Boston, and he’s supposed to be spending time with her at his home in Caloodie in outback Queensland. But instead, they’ve driven 400 kilometres west to the tiny mining town of Kanpara to pick up Walker’s cousin Blair, who’s been digging for boulder opals and is suddenly very keen to get out. It’s not like Blair to quit so easily. Walker has the definite sense that something is off.
On their arrival, the atmosphere is already tense with rumours of a life-changing opal discovery. The following day, they awake to find that Kanpara has been completely cut off by a flood and the roads will be closed for days. As they take in their predicament, Blair receives a shocking phone call.
A man and a woman have been found brutally murdered.
The murdered woman’s husband is an immediate suspect, but Walker isn’t convinced. Could the killings be connected to the rumoured opal find? When the police take Blair in for questioning, the stakes couldn’t be higher for Walker. He must now work with his fellow officers to uncover the killer in the community’s midst before the waters recede and make escape possible. Can he unravel the mystery quickly enough to save his cousin and keep Grace safe?
The thrilling third instalment in the bestselling DS Lucas Walker series, Opal is full of breathtaking twists and dark turns.
Review
By Rachel le Rossignol
Opal is the third book in the DS Walker series, preceded by Outback and Paradise. Although there are callbacks to characters and events from the earlier books, these are given enough context that the reader will enjoy Opal as a standalone story. But if you haven’t read the first two, the pace, drama and chills of this one will have you seeking them out as soon as you finish it.
At the beginning of Opal, DS Lucas Walker is on desk duty with the Australian Federal Police in Canberra, and not happy about it, after having his identity exposed while undercover investigating the Vandals, a motorcycle gang deeply involved in the drug trade. When his half-sister Grace arrives from Boston, he takes a break from work to take her to meet his family in the small town of Caloodie. But their holiday quickly veers off course when Lucas learns his cousin Blair is stuck in Kanpara, an isolated opal mining town, and needs someone to pick him up. Grace insists on coming along for the ride.
Thanks to a prologue that skilfully sets the scene and draws you straight into the story, the reader knows from the outset about what Lucas and Grace are driving into. This sets up an ominous tone that only grows as the characters in the town are introduced. What started as a simple trip to pick up Blair turns into a far more dangerous proposition when Lucas discovers the Vandals’ reach extends even to Kanpara, creating a menacing shadow over the whole community. The rumoured discovery of a giant, million-dollar opal, and its subsequent disappearance, creates further tension, and that is before two of the townspeople are found murdered. When an unexpected flood cuts Kanpara off from the outside world completely, the sense of distrust and suspicion ramps up to fever pitch. No one can leave, and there is a murderer in town. The longer everyone remains trapped, the more tensions grow.
As the central character, Lucas Walker is a driven, work-focused but very human cop, dealing with grief at the recent loss of his grandmother, frustrations with his job, and guilt that his plans to spend time with Grace have been derailed by the murder. Although he has no official role in the investigation, he soon finds himself with a strong motivation to solve it. His clear, open-minded approach is contrasted well with that of DSS Stones, the blow-in cop from Longreach who has arrived by helicopter to deal with the double murder. Stones jumps to conclusions and won’t accept any perceived challenges to his authority, which causes problems with the investigation. Skilful use of varied language convincingly takes you into the thoughts and emotions of Walker and Stones, as well as a range of other characters, bringing to life the complications, passions and politics of a small town and its memorable, strong personalities.
The town itself is a silent, ever-present character too, its isolation and dusty landscape the perfect backdrop for a story built on mistrust, paranoia and betrayal. Opal is a tightly written, dynamic thriller where suspicion shifts as suddenly as the hidden depths of the floodwaters. With an array of suspects who all have credible motives for one or other of a range of crimes, and pacing and tone that expertly build the sense of danger with every chapter, Opalis one of those books that is genuinely hard to put down.