The pit by Peter Papathanasiou

Senior Constable Sparrow is the Aboriginal offsider to Detective Sergeant Georgios Manolis, both of whom we met in Papathansiou’s first crime thriller The Stoning. This time Sparrow is on his own, intrigued by the phone confession of a murderer who invites him on a trip to the crime scene in the Kimberley outback. The snag is, the old man insists on also taking along a young companion from his Perth nursing home, Luke, who is confined to a wheelchair. So the three runaways set out on their long road trip: ‘the old rogue, the young pup, and the undercover blackfella’.

The pit is a gritty ‘outback noir’ exposing all the worst elements of remote Australia: bigotry, racism, corrupt cops, prostitutes, drugs, alcoholism, derelict hotels, asbestos contamination, mining and destruction of Aboriginal lands. Bob, as a homosexual in the 1960s, has experienced the worst of it all. We know that he has serious medical issues; a condition that is most likely terminal. What he hopes to achieve by the trip with these particular companions is a mystery. But the signs are that it will be dangerous.

While the characters don’t seem particularly likeable at the start, even the ambiguous Sparrow, and especially the ill-tempered and demanding Luke, Papathanasiou does succeed in engaging our empathy as the story progresses. And amidst the grime, there are moments of appreciation of the beauty of the wild outback. This is a book that will appeal to readers of the increasingly rugged genre of Australian crime novels.

Themes: Outback Australia, Road trip, Murder, Crime, Homophobia, Toxic masculinity.

Helen Eddy