Broke Road: This page-turner will have you guessing until the end
After his acclaimed debut novel, Matthew Spencer has delivered another convincing police procedural.
Sydney journalist turned crime novelist Matthew Spencer has a reporter’s eye for detail when it comes to character description. Here’s Neville Oakeshott, a property developer who is spreading his wings in NSW’s Hunter Valley, walking into a restaurant on a wine estate he owns:
“ … a man swept in … without a glance at the door girl. Pale lemon shirt open at the collar under a powder blue suit with brown shoes lighter than the carpet. A full head of silver hair was whisked back, fondling his collar. His suntan said summering in Europe on a yacht …”
Here’s 58-year-old fifth-generation winemaker Bob Bruce: “Known as a world-class pisshead. Which is saying something round here. He can get a bit cuddly with, ah, females in his employ.”
Here’s the manager of a hotel built by Oakeshott Constructions: “Jayson Cassidy. Jayson – with a y”, who is the last known person to see the victim alive.
Is one of them the killer of 27-year-old Penelope Armytage, whose quiet, violent murder opens Spencer’s second novel, Broke Road?
She’s dead on the floor of her townhouse, a recent development by Oakeshott Constructions, “long, thin tanned legs, pink knickers on inside out with the tag showing, a dishevelled white T-shirt, no bra, a mane of blonde hair out loose …”
The cause of death is manual strangulation. The killer is “tall, fast and strong”.
She is found by her 32-year-old husband Nigel, a mining geologist. There are no signs of forced entry and no suggestion of a struggle. His alibi is “watertight but dribbling”. They were a beautiful couple living in glorious wine country but she, who worked in marketing, and did a bit of work for the winemaker Bruce, didn’t approve of his job.
“He’s digging up coal. That’s not beautiful. That’s what knuckle draggers do.” That’s the cut-to-the-chase observation of Sydney homicide detective Rose Riley, who is assigned the case. As it happens, she grew up in the area.
Riley returns from Spencer’s award-winning 2022 debut, Black River, set in Sydney, as does her offsider, Taree-born Priya Patel, as well as Adam Bowman, a journalist they semi-trust who has written a best-selling true crime book with Riley at its centre.
Bowman, now freelance and driving an Audi, heads along Broke Road to the murder town, Red Creek, to ply his trade. His opposition is Laura Nolan from the Newcastle bureau of the Sydney Mirror, “tabloid trained to hunt and kill”.
As Riley notes, the victim is “young, white, professional, gorgeous” and living in a tourism hotspot. “It’s going to blow up – deluxe.” Bowman adds that the geologist husband angle will have “the ABC wetting its pants”. And it does go deluxe, but not for the reasons Riley expects. Will there be more killings? All I can say is that this is a 400-page crime novel.
What follows from Penny’s murder is a propulsive whodunit. As police procedurals go, this one is convincing, and the author thanks real-life detectives and forensic pathologists (and winemakers) in his acknowledgments. It shows how much work it takes to solve a crime, especially one where everyone is a suspect.
A journalist on this newspaper for 20 years, the author takes some gentle pokes at his alumni. Bowman “had an interest in wine, because he drank a lot of it, but no actual knowledge”. Bowman also quotes from TS Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which I well remember a colleague doing one night in a wine bar. Perhaps Spencer was there too.
As he did in his first novel, the author makes contemporary issues part of the crime scene. In this case it’s mining versus tourism, fossil fuels and global warming (“You think I killed my wife over fracking?” Nigel asks in the police interview room), property development and the gentrification of rural towns, multiculturalism (“I’ll take your word for it,” Patel says when anyone makes a comment about India) and whether chardonnay has had its day.
Spencer’s second novel is a page-turner that will have readers guessing until the end. Will the main characters survive for a third novel? Well, as Detective Rose Riley well knows, there are no guarantees in her line of work. “Homicide,’’ she admits on page one, “was killing her.”
Stephen Romei is an adjunct research fellow in the School of Humanities at La Trobe University.
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