Ash Island

September 19, 2016
The gripping second installment of Maitland’s Belltree trilogy (after 2015’s Crucifixion Creek) finds Det. Sgt. Harry Belltree and his pregnant wife, Jenny, exiled from Sydney to Newcastle, Australia. As Harry probes into the hit-and-run that killed his parents and claimed Jenny’s vision three years earlier, he discovers a connection to Karl Nordlund, a powerful, unscrupulous businessman, and Karl’s troubled niece. At the same time, a series of brutal homicides pits Harry against an unsavory local character with a vendetta against him and a Sydney gang with whom he’s tangled before. Meanwhile, reporter Kelly Pool crosses paths with Harry again when her search for the woman who arranged her kidnapping takes her to Newcastle. Maitland adroitly balances multiple characters and plot lines, weaving together apparent coincidences into a complex, compelling tale of far-reaching greed and corruption. Armchair travelers will enjoy this foray Down Under, and the heart-wrenching ending is sure to leave them eager for the trilogy’s final volume.

DS Harry Belltree ruffled and singed so many feathers in Sydney Homicide in his explosive first appearance (Crucifixion Creek, 2014, etc.) that he's been rusticated to far-off Newcastle. It's not nearly far enough to ensure the safety of himself, his blind, pregnant wife, Jenny, or assorted well-connected lowlifes.Trouble begins with the discovery of a disfigured corpse buried in the muck of Ash Island. As Harry suspects from the first, the late Cheung Xiuying, a galley hand on the coal-hauling ship Jialing, is only the first of a bitter crop harvested from the same unofficial graveyard. By the time garageman Marco Ganis is identified as another victim, Harry's already managed to arrest Wattle Gulley Mine employee Logan McGilvray for beating his wife, been accused by McGilvray of police brutality in the course of the unquestionably brutal arrest, and antagonized every higher-up on the Newcastle Police. All that's needed is for him to tie both McGilvray and the murders to all-powerful Nordlund Resources Ltd. NRL is a family firm whose principals might as well belong to the Corleone family. Konrad Nordlund has extended his reach from NRL to the Sydney Times, imperiling the ongoing inquiries of Harry's acquaintance, investigative reporter Kelly Pool; his brother, Bernard, seems to want nothing to do with the family firm; and their niece, Amber, seems unwontedly eager to bring the whole enterprise down by sharing every incriminating detail she can with Harry. Readers who remember the lethal Crows gang from Harry's debut will be happy to see that they play an active role in this installment and that they have nothing on the Nordlunds' ability to wreak havoc throughout Newcastle. Once again, Maitland plots and writes with furious intensity. Though this second chapter in the Belltree trilogy assumes considerable knowledge of the first and ends as inconclusively as you'd expect, it certainly does a fine job setting fans up for the third and final chapter. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2016
Harry Belltree of the Sydney, Australia, police force has mellowed since he appeared in Maitland's Crucifixion Creek (2015). He no longer blows away people he considers menaces, though he's not above an occasional hard knock on the head. This time Belltree is investigating the murder of two men on Ash Island, off New South Wales. His inquiries reveal links with drugs and investors' schemes to gut the island for glitzy development. There's another link, this one with a violent incident in the earlier novel: the car crash that killed Harry's parents and left his young wife blind. The slow pace is a problem: the first 90 pages are talk and more talk, so much so that one welcomes a bomb going off. It's bothersome that the service dog for Harry's blind wife behaves inconsistently: rescuing the couple from an explosion one minute, and then, when the woman needs help, chasing rabbits. But the grand finale, going on for 45 pages, is well worth waiting for. All in all, this is a worthy contribution to the growing body of Australian hard-boiled fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

June 1, 2016

A Ned Kelly Award winner for The Malcontenta, part of the long-running "Brock and Kolla" series, Australian-based Maitland received considerable praise here for Crucifixion Creek, first in a trilogy starring homicide detective Harry Belltree. In this follow-up, Harry returns to work after a near-fatal tete-a-tete with some ethically suspect colleagues but for obvious reasons has opted for Newcastle over his old force in Sydney. Soon, he's dealing with a dead body found on nearby Ash Island, even as he reopens his investigation of the car crash that killed his parents and blinded his wife.

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