Opal Country

A brilliantly atmospheric mystery.

Heat

This novel - tighter, tougher, tenser - is Hammer's best work yet.

The Times

Keeps you stuck to the story like an Outback miner's shirt to his back

The Sun

A master of the crime genre

South Africa Sunday Times

Chris Hammer is regarded as one of Australia's best new noir crime writers, and this immersive and lyrically written thriller copper-fastens this well-deserved reputation.

Irish Independent

Gold standard Outback noir [...] Chris Hammer's best writing to date.

Crime Fiction Lover

Nobody does Australian outback crime better. Hammer nails it again.

Peterborough Telegraph

Opal Country is richly rewarding. Hammer is quite brilliant.

Shots Magazine

A fast-paced and thrilling read.

Brown Flopsy's Book Burrow

A sharp thriller

Woman's Own

Stunning ... Scrublands is that rare combination, a page-turner that stays long in the memory

Sunday Times (Crime Book of the Month)

A dark and brilliant thriller, one that lingers in the mind

Mail On Sunday

Extremely accomplished ... Deliciously noirish ... Set in the blistering heat of a remote Australian town ravaged by drought and threatened by bushfires, this is a complex, meaty, intelligent mystery ... Hammer's writing is so evocative the heat practically rises off the pages of Scrublands

Guardian 'Best Recent Thrillers'

My pick for debut thriller of the month (and maybe of 2019) ... Beautifully written, this would make a terrific small-screen series

Washington Post

Well-rounded characters, masterful plotting and real breadth; this is an epic and immersive read

Guardian

A heatwave of a novel, scorching and powerful... Extraordinary

AJ Finn

Atmospheric, utterly gripping, and written with devastating beauty. Scrublands is as scorching as wildfire and as hard to look away from

author of She Lies in Wait

Incendiary . . . A rattling good read, ambitious in scale and scope and delivering right up to the last, powerfully moving page

Irish Times

Scrublands is the epic novel about rural life in Australia that we need right now ... It sits right up there with the late Peter Temple's Broken Shore, Garry Disher's Bitterwash Road and Jane Harper's The Dry, even as it extends their focus and reach ... Remarkable

Sydney Morning Herald

It's hard not to compare Chris Hammer's Scrublands to Jane Harper's acclaimed The Dry ... [It will] capture your imagination from the first page

The Age

Set in the parched Australian landscape, Scrublands is a brilliantly plotted thriller which reveals a town full of brooding secrets. I couldn't put this compelling debut down

author of The Shrouded Path

Scrublands kidnapped me for 48 hours. I was hopelessly lost in the scorching Australian landscape, disoriented but completely immersed in the town and people of Riversend, as the heat crackled off the pages. I was devastated when it was time to go back to the real world. This book is a force of nature. A must-read for all crime fiction fans

Sarah Bailey

Brilliant and unsettling, Scrublands stands at the junction of Snowtown and Wake in Fright, that place where Australia's mirage of bush tranquillity evaporates into our hidden fears

Paul Daley, writer and journalist

A superbly drawn, utterly compelling evocation of a small town riven by a shocking crime

Mark Brandi

Hammer's portrait of a dying, drought-struck town numbed by a priest's unimaginable act of violence will capture you from the first explosive page and refuse to let go until the last. His remarkable writing takes you inside lives twisted by secrets festering beneath the melting heat of the inland, the scrub beyond waiting to burst into flame. Scrublands is the read of the year. Unforgettable

Tony Wright

A compulsively page-turning thriller where the parched interior looms as large as the characters

Guardian Australia