Press Reviews

• Karen Hardy

  The Age

  It's hard not to compare Chris Hammer's Scrublands to Jane Harper's acclaimed The Dry ... [It will] capture your imagination from the first page

• Sue Turnbull

  Sydney Morning Herald

  Scrublands is the epic novel about rural life in Australia that we need right now ... It sits right up there with the late Peter Temple's Broken Shore, Garry Disher's Bitterwash Road and Jane Harper's The Dry, even as it extends their focus and reach ... Remarkable

• Sarah Ward

  author of The Shrouded Path

  Set in the parched Australian landscape, Scrublands is a brilliantly plotted thriller which reveals a town full of brooding secrets. I couldn't put this compelling debut down

• AJ Finn

  A heatwave of a novel, scorching and powerful... Extraordinary

• Sarah Bailey

  Scrublands kidnapped me for 48 hours. I was hopelessly lost in the scorching Australian landscape, disoriented but completely immersed in the town and people of Riversend, as the heat crackled off the pages. I was devastated when it was time to go back to the real world. This book is a force of nature. A must-read for all crime fiction fans

• Paul Daley, writer and journalist

  Brilliant and unsettling, Scrublands stands at the junction of Snowtown and Wake in Fright, that place where Australia's mirage of bush tranquillity evaporates into our hidden fears

• Mark Brandi

  A superbly drawn, utterly compelling evocation of a small town riven by a shocking crime

• Tony Wright

  Hammer's portrait of a dying, drought-struck town numbed by a priest's unimaginable act of violence will capture you from the first explosive page and refuse to let go until the last. His remarkable writing takes you inside lives twisted by secrets festering beneath the melting heat of the inland, the scrub beyond waiting to burst into flame. Scrublands is the read of the year. Unforgettable

• Katharine Murphy

  Guardian Australia

  A compulsively page-turning thriller where the parched interior looms as large as the characters

• Bethanne Patrick

  Washington Post

  My pick for debut thriller of the month (and maybe of 2019) ... Beautifully written, this would make a terrific small-screen series

• Declan Hughes

  Irish Times

  Incendiary . . . A rattling good read, ambitious in scale and scope and delivering right up to the last, powerfully moving page

• Laura Wilson

  Guardian

  Well-rounded characters, masterful plotting and real breadth; this is an epic and immersive read

• Alison Flood

  Guardian 'Best Recent Thrillers'

  Extremely accomplished ... Deliciously noirish ... Set in the blistering heat of a remote Australian town ravaged by drought and threatened by bushfires, this is a complex, meaty, intelligent mystery ... Hammer's writing is so evocative the heat practically rises off the pages of Scrublands

• Joan Smith

  Sunday Times (Crime Book of the Month)

  Stunning ... Scrublands is that rare combination, a page-turner that stays long in the memory

• Ann Cleeves

  author of Raven Black and Wild Fire

  An almost perfect crime novel ... Intelligent, thought-provoking, great narrative energy, a central character who's imperfect but self-aware, and of course that amazing setting ... I loved it'

• Mail On Sunday

  A dark and brilliant thriller, one that lingers in the mind

• Gytha Lodge

  author of She Lies in Wait

  Atmospheric, utterly gripping, and written with devastating beauty. Scrublands is as scorching as wildfire and as hard to look away from