Chain of Evidence

Winner of the Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Fiction, 2007.

Twice now he'd watched her take this detour after school, down to the waterfront reserve, to the magic of the Waterloo Show. Dodgem cars, Ferris wheel, fairy floss on a stick. The Show was a magnet to all kinds of kids, but he had chosen only one.

Ten-year-old Katie Blasko is missing. Detective Sergeant Ellen Destry, alert to rumours of a paedophile ring operating on the Peninsula, is thinking abduction. Her colleagues are thinking bad family, truancy. Her boss is thinking about the media. And everyone, including Ellen, is wondering whether she's good enough to handle this without D. I. Challis.

But Hal Challis is a thousand kilometres away, watching his father die. Ellen Destry's leading the team on her own. And if she's right, Katie Blasko is running out of time.

Garry Disher has published almost fifty titles—fiction, children's books, anthologies, textbooks, the Wyatt thrillers and the Peninsula Crimes series. He has won numerous awards, including the German Crime Prize (twice) and two Ned Kelly Best Crime novel awards, for Chain of Evidence (2007) and Wyatt (2010). Garry lives on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula.

'The plot twists lie a backroad short cut and pulls like the rip.' Sunday Age

'In his best novel yet in what has been a distinguished career, [Disher] propels us methodically yet elegiacally, the past impending on the present and setting the future into sometimes quite astonishing motion...Now on the same procedural shelf as international greats such as John Harvey, Tony Hillerman and Ian Rankin, Disher brings crime fiction back to simple facts, the painful themes that churn beneath banal surfaces. No one works the flat, elided plains of realism better.' Graeme Blundell, Weekend Australian

'This instalment puts Disher up on the world stage among the best in the business at this style of crime fiction.' Age

'Mulltilayered and multistranded, Chain of Evidence is written in vivid and uncompromising prose.' Sydney Morning Herald

'A compelling mix of procedural detail and action round out a fully credible plot and characters...a deeply satisfying read.' Publishers Weekly

'Disher has a slick, fast style that's delightfully free of filler and extraneous plotlines. Once the hook is set, he just lets the story pull you along...Disher is definitely not to be missed.' Toronto Globe & Mail