Haunted Creek, by Maryanne Ross

This debut novel by Maryanne Ross is a page-turner and it got me in, proving that the author is a very good writer, with a very observant eye. There is real meat in her writing, and plenty which resonated with me. In fact I felt very envious of her ways with words, especially her metaphors and similes, which are memorable.

The book demonstrates her obvious love of her natural environment, the Aussie way-of-life, the dry Aussie sense of humour and the Aussie way of behaving and speaking, all captured very well. The link between the aborigines and the Celts and the inclusion of family history in the story is ingenious. This book is a wonderful pen-portrait of 'big city' meets 'country town' in the vibrant state of Victoria. However I couldn’t quite work out the book’s intended target audience. Domestic or international? Sometimes it seemed as if the author was explaining Australia to a reader overseas (superfluous info for a local reader), yet at other times the need for ‘local knowledge’ was very strong but unexplained.

I really liked this book being written in the first person, especially by Aurora, a well-rounded, strong, believable and likeable character. Through Aurora I learned a lot about IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) and exercise regimes, including pole dancing! Amy is well-drawn although some of the observations made by the Teen-Team nearer the end sounded a bit too adult. Sonia McLeod’s transition from ‘bitch’ to suffering confidante and beloved wife, with a rapid reversion to ‘bitch’, was the least convincing part of the characterisation. The Aborigines, Italians and Chinese were conveyed realistically. I barely registered in Chapter 1 that Lonsdale Lovett was an Aborigine and it wasn’t made clear until the end of Chapter 6 that Birch was too, so I didn’t pick up on the Dreamtime connection to Aurora’s ‘visions’ in the opening chapter, which left me a little confused.

This book came as a very big and very pleasant surprise to me, mainly because there is a real disconnect between its contents and its promo on Amazon. The cover (perhaps wrongly) suggests to me a traditional ghost story, especially the ‘title words’ component, which made me think of vampires dripping blood, not Dreamtime ghosts connected to the children of the first Jimmy McLeod.

The blurb doesn’t do the book justice either. It suggests a superficial and rather flippant romp, a theme continued by the place names in the book, which mocked and belied the depth and value of the story. Haunted Hills/Creek, Ghost Gully, Skeleton Creek, Spectral Hills/Mountains, Blue Misty Hills (why not just Misty Hills?) all grated on my nerves – overkill! They didn’t sound very Australian and didn’t gel with the genuineness of the character names, or the story.

Maybe the author selected these names to target the paranormal genre, which I don’t read. To my mind this is more of a traditional crime novel than anything else, an unusual and very imaginatively-conceived one. After a while I decided to ignore the irritation of place names and focus on the story.

There was one other source of irritation. Although the book was edited, there were a number of minor glitches with punctuation (missing commas, missing hyphens, missing quotation marks, even missing words), but I see this with many ebooks, even reprints of ‘the classics’, so it is possibly a technical problem with the digital conversion process.

All in all, this impressive first novel weaves and tells a fast-paced ‘cop solves crime’ story. Maryanne Ross has neatly left the way open for a successful series, with Aurora having further adventures as she deals with the Chinese businessmen featured in ‘Haunted Creek’, and Rooster retained as the ongoing male interest. I recommend that you make Aurora’s acquaintance.