Homicide detective Frank Bennett feels like the luckiest man on the force when he meets his new partner, the dark and beautiful Eden Archer. But there’s something strange about Eden and her brother, Eric. Something he can’t quite put his finger on.
At first, as they race to catch a very different kind of serial killer, his partner’s sharp instincts come in handy. But soon Frank’s wondering if she’s as dangerous as the man they hunt.

I love to travel to places that are familiar enough that I don’t feel overwhelmed by strangeness but different enough that all my senses come alive, processing the unexpected, delighting in the new, and warily assessing the weird. Reading Hades was like that kind of travel. 

It’s a police procedural novel told from the point of view of a new-to-this-department Homicide Detective working with his new partner to catch a serial killer. I know that kind of book. I’ve read lots of them. I take them in my stride. But… Hades only looks like that kind of book. It’s actually something fascinatingly different. Something dark and dangerous hidden in plain sight by my own expectations. Something that, once I spotted it, I had to understand.

I met the man called Hades on the first page of a Prologue that I knew had to be linked to the serial killer narrative that the publisher’s summary had told me of but I didn’t know how. I did know that I was already somewhere different and dark. Here’s the first paragraph:

“As soon as the stranger set the bundle on the floor, Hades could tell it was the body of a child. It was curled on its side and wrapped in a worn blue sheet secured with duct tape around the neck, waist and knees. One tiny pearl-coloured foot poked out from the hem, limp on his sticky linoleum. Hades leaned against the counter of his cramped, cluttered kitchen and stared at that little foot. The stranger shifted uneasily in the doorway, drew a cigarette from a packet and pulled out some matches. The man they called Hades lifted his eyes briefly to the stranger’s thin angled face.”

Hades already felt threatening I wanted to know who the child was and whether it lived and what the man expected Hades to do with it. I found out all of those things in the next couple of pages and each one of them surprised and sank like a barb into my imagination. I wanted to know more.

So, of course, Chapter One has no obvious connection to the Prologue and I have to reorient myself. Now, I’m in police procedural land, looking through the eyes of a cop at his new partner. Here are the first two paragraphs:

“I figured I’d struck it lucky when I first laid eyes on Eden Archer. She was sitting by the window with her back to me. I could just see a slice of her angular face when she surveyed the circle of men around her. It seemed to be some kind of counselling session, probably about the man I was replacing, Eden’s late partner. Some of the men in the circle were grey-faced and sullen, like they were only just keeping their emotions in check. The psychologist himself looked as if someone had just stolen his last zack.

Eden, on the other hand, was quietly contemplative. She had a flick-blade in her right hand, visible only to me, and she was sliding it open and shut with her thumb. I ran my eyes over her long black braid and licked my teeth. I knew her type, had encountered plenty in the academy. No friends, no interest in having a mess around in the male dorms on quiet weekends when the officers were away. She could run in those three-inch heels, no doubt about that. The forty-dollar manicure was her third this month but she would break a rat’s neck if she found it in her pantry. I liked the look of her. I liked the way she breathed, slow and calm, while the officers around her tried not to fall to pieces.”

I know at once that I don’t like the guy whose eyes I’m looking through. Part of me wonders at having moved from Hades to Eden, no writer would let that be a coincidence, but I can’t see a connection yet. Still, I’m just few pages in and I already know that I don’t know what’s going on, that there people aren’t who I was expecting and that this is going to shape up into an excellent read.

Hades, it turned out, was a book that declined to follow genre norms. It cut its own bloody and surprising path to resolution. It was the first book I’d read where the Homicide Detectives seemed to be the dangerous ones. At first, I thought it was just Frank Bennett, the newbie through whose eyes I saw Eden Archer for the first time. He’s a piece of work. A violent angry man who takes drugs and beats his wife. Yet he’s eclipsed in the strange and dangerous stakes by his partner and her twin brother, Eric, who is also a Homicide Detective and is instantly recognisable as a charismatic psychopath. Given that the police are supposed to be the good guys, you can imagine how bad the serial killer was.

Hades is told on two timelines, a Now one seen through Bennett’s eyes as he and Eden hunt the serial killer, and a Then one that follows what Hades did after the Prologue. I enjoyed the dual timeline and dual point-of-view storytelling and admired how well the narrative structure maintained the tension while developing the characters.

I ended the book deeply satisfied by my visit with Eden Archer. I was surprised when I found out that Hades was Candice Fox’s debut novel but I wasn’t surprised that it won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction (2014).

I’m keen to read the next two books in the trilogy: Eden which won the Ned Kelly Award for Best Fiction (2015) and Fall.

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