by Pip Fioretti
Publisher: Affirm Press, 2025
Review
by Rachel le Rossignol
If you like your murder mystery sepia-toned, then Skull River is the book for you. Set in 1912, the story centres on the murder of a mounted trooper in the tiny rural town of Colley, New South Wales. It transports the reader to a time when life was tough, and the people who lived through it had to be strong to survive. Every detail creates the time period with ease, from attitudes and colloquialisms to the tiniest details of life. This is historical fiction and crime wrapped in an immersive sense of time, place, and story.
Gus Hawkins is a veteran of the Boer War and now a mounted trooper. The story begins on his first day on the job, and dawn has barely arrived when his deputy is shot and killed in front of him. Returning to the police station, he discovers it is on fire. Clearly, his time in Colley is not going to be a simple posting.
A deeply wounded protagonist, Gus featured in Fioretti’s previous book, The Bone Lands, and there are some callbacks to that story, but with enough context that you don’t need to have read it to understand what drives Gus and why he suffers from debilitating PTSD. Gus’s wry humour and spare speaking style are evident from the start, and his quiet rebellion against the bureaucrats who hinder his investigation gives an appealing edge to what he does. Even his bleak outlook on life is understandable when you understand what he has been through as the past that haunts him is retriggered through the terrible events that hold Colley hostage.
Colley was once a thriving goldfields hub but is now the mere memory of a town, abandoned and picked over. There is a strong sense of place, the rocky, forbidding, and isolated landscape haunted by Hawkins’ recent and distant memories, so he sees danger and death all around. Occasionally though, Fioretti shifts into moments of pure poetry in her descriptions of the landscape, particularly when memories evoke happier moments now lost to time.
Every character in the book is fully realised, which contributes to the sense that the reader is a shadowy watcher of real people whose motives and perspectives ring true to life, creating an absorbing and, at times, heartbreaking, experience.
Skull River is an original take on the investigative process due to the time setting, but also due to the realistic and unpredictable responses of those living a hard life outside of the larger towns and cities, often on the edge of desperation and with little to lose. This creates a character-driven story whose twists and turns keep you turning the pages long into the night.
Publisher’s blurb
In a fading gold town, the seams of violence run deep.
‘I was like a man washed ashore on an island, half mad and only my warrant card and blood-soaked uniform to vouch for me. But I had to act as if I knew what the hell to do.‘
In Autumn of 1912, mounted trooper Augustus Hawkins arrives at his new post in the fading gold town of Colley, NSW. On his first day, he is ambushed by a hidden gunman, his junior officer is killed before his eyes, and he escapes back to town to find the police station burning to the ground. Someone has it in for the mounted troopers.
A traumatised veteran of the Boer War, and a stranger to Colley, Hawkins is deeply shaken and ill-equipped to solve the case. But with only green troopers and a drunken, incompetent detective available to hunt down the murderer, he is forced to take the lead. Soon he finds that Colley hides a lot more than gold beneath its surface, for anyone who knows where to dig.
In Skull River, Gus Hawkins returns for a gripping and immersive hunt through a small town at the edge of a troubled empire. With black humour, Fioretti weaves a story that’s both a cracking murder mystery and a razor-sharp portrayal of a country on the verge of transformation.