Il y aurait à redire sur le fond (encore un polar violent/conspi ) mais la forme reste maitrisée, et le héros qui devrait être détestable a une certaine épaisseur. ( )

DEAD GIRL SING is the second instalment of Tony Cavanaugh’s Queensland based series starring ex-cop-turned-vigilante Darian Richards. He is once again dragged reluctantly from his self-imposed retirement; this time because a young woman whose life he saved in the last book rings him out of the blue and says something along the lines of “only you can help..there are so many bodies” and then promptly vanishes into thin air. Darian contacts local a policewoman he knows in Noosa and asks her to follow it up, which she does by asking a Gold Coast based colleague to check out the location Darian has given. When this policeman also disappears Darian decides he must get more actively involved, whereupon he discovers the bodies of two dead girls in a shallow pool of water in the Gold Coast hinterland, bests the local plods with his super-human intelligence and starts his hunt for the missing girl.

I felt this novel wasn’t so much asking me to suspend my disbelief as demanding I buy it a one-way ticket to Bhutan. There just didn’t seem to be a single realistic element to the novel and that’s a hard sell, especially when a book takes itself as seriously as this one appears to. Darian Richards pontificates lengthily about his superior intellect, detecting skills and ability to apply justice which is topped off with a whole load of self-aggrandizing claptrap from the killer’s point of view and there’s no hint of the tongue in cheek humour I need to make the ‘impossibly brilliant hero’ trope even vaguely interesting to me.

It’s not spoiling anything to reveal that the plot of this novel revolves around human trafficking. Cavanaugh’s ‘take’ on the subject is to make the villain a woman which could have been an interesting twist but the character is completely over the top and I did not find her voice very credible. Eventually we learn the reasons behind Starlight’s behaviour but I didn’t really buy into all that either; it felt more like an awful series of violent vignettes strung together for shock value than an actual person’s story.

I think DEAD GIRL SING belongs more in the old-fashioned Western category – a good (if not always legally sound) guy doing battle with a bad guy (or girl) – than it does in crime fiction. There’s precious little mystery to be had as we learn who the killer is and why the crimes are being committed long before the end and the book focuses instead on the interplay between anti hero and villain. Any vestiges of suspense that might have remained are wiped away by the presence of Isosceles. He’s the mega genius geek that Darian has on permanent speed dial who can hack into anything he pleases at the touch of a button. There really is no tension to be had when the protagonist of a crime story can get out of any jam or find out whatever he needs to know so effortlessly.

Ultimately I suppose this is just not my kind of thing. I found Darian and Starlight to have equally inflated egos and neither they nor their battle of wits engaged me at all. The book doesn’t spend any serious time letting us get to know the victims – apart from via the gruesome violence they suffer – which further disconnected me from goings on. My overriding response to it was boredom.

Follow up to PROMISE, DEAD GIRL SING again takes Richards out into the field, away from his retirement, all in the defence of somebody he feels he owes.

Triggered by a phone call from Ida, a girl he never expected to hear from again (even though he left that phone on / charged / ready), Richards is suddenly not just responsible for the life of a missing girl, but also a dead cop and two dead girls. Somehow in the middle of the notorious schoolies week on the Gold Coast, in the middle of that seething mass of hormones, alcohol and crazy that descends every year, Richards alone gets a bit of a sniff of something twisted and very determined. Somehow young women are quietly disappearing and nobody else seems to be connecting the neon-lit dots quite like Richards does.

As in PROMISE, DEAD GIRL SING has, at its core, a descent into the creepy, crazy, lunatic side of mayhem. In this case, whilst somebody is quietly disappearing young women up and down the Gold Coast, there's also that dawning idea that perhaps murder may not be the absolute worst fate that can befall. Without giving away anything of the plot, there's a slow reveal of the perpetrator here that's probably not going to come as a huge surprise (there's a bit of build up that kind of hints where we are going), there's a series of disappearances, and one young woman in particular that Richards is tracking with help from his mysterious high-tech Melbourne hacker mate.

There is so very very much in this series that you'd think I'd hate. More mad, bad protagonists, although in DEAD GIRL SING we at least have some reasons and explanation. There's all the high-tech wizardry which normally has me grinding my teeth in exasperation, and yet, in this case, the idea of Isosceles, sitting in his high-rise Melbourne tower, tracking, watching, following actually isn't that hard to believe, and is rather endearing and familiar.

But this is not a series I hate. Quite the opposite as it turns out. Despite all the things that grate just a little, I really like the Darian Richards books. Maybe it's the no-nonsense, matter-of-fact, pragmatic Richards - a lone wolf with a skewed moral compass and a form of ethics that he sticks with. Come hell or high water. Isosceles with his encyclopaedic knowledge of minutia (or a fast track on Wikipedia searches). Maria, the cop sidekick who doesn't want to be. Constantly drawn into Richard's orbit she's drawn between being a good cop and the fact that Richards get's his killers. One way or another.

Neither of these books is without flaws, but then this isn't a super-hero good guy without flaws either. Neither of these books are straightforward or comfortable reading. But they are strong, have a great sense of personality and a quintessential "Australian-ness" about the observations, dialogue and behaviour. DEAD GIRL SING is a strong second book with improvements over and above the first one. It's a series that I'd be really happy to see continue.

http://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/dead-girl-sing-tony-cavanaugh ( )