DS Lucas Walker is on leave in his hometown, Caloodie, taking care of his dying grandmother. When two young German backpackers, Berndt and Rita, vanish from the area, he finds himself unofficially on the case. 
But why all the interest from the Federal Police when they have probably just ditched the heat and dust of the outback for the coast?
Working in the organised crime unit has opened Walker’s eyes to the growing drug trade in Australia’s remote interior – and he becomes convinced there is more at play.
As the number of days since the couple’s disappearance climbs, Walker is joined by Rita’s older sister. A detective herself with Berlin CID, she has flown to Australia – desperate to find her sister.Their search becomes ever more urgent as temperatures soar.
Even if Walker does find the young couple, will it be too late?

What I liked most about ‘Outback’ was that it felt firmly grounded in reality.

The North Queensland desert became almost a character in its own right, its unremitting harshness dominating the lives of the people trying to live in it or even just trying to pass through it.

The people in the small town of Caloodie felt real. Patricia Wolf captured their speech patterns and the small details of their behaviour in ways that quickly immersed me in their community.

The police procedural aspects of the investigation were plausible and delivered at a pace that sustained the tension of the story but also matched the rate at which two investigators might reasonably be expected to work.

Seeing DS Walker surrounded by his extended family and dealing with the imminent death from cancer of the grandmother who raised him from a character who was there to solve puzzles to a real person with more on his mind than the case in hand.

Seeing the town, its people and DS Walker through the eyes of a police detective from Berlin, the sister of one of the missing German tourists, allowed some of the odd-but-taken-for-granted-by-the-people-who-live-there aspects of Australian small-town culture to be examined and explained from both an outsider and insider point of view.

All of that made for a very satisfying read.

The plot, which involves the investigation of the disappearance of two German tourists who we know have been abducted, was a strong one. The story was unfurled in a way that allowed the reader to know what was being done to the two tourists but not who was doing it. This meant that, as the investigators assembled information, the reader had the fun of guessing whether or not they were looking at the right suspect. I enjoyed that the investigation was complicated further by plot lines involving police corruption, organised crime and the possible existence of a serial killer.

All of that kept me turning the pages eagerly.

The book concludes with some very intense action scenes that pulled everything together. I was totally immersed in the action, to the point that when one of the investigators did something stupid that put them at risk, I found myself saying “How could you do that? You should know better!”

The only thing that I was a little disappointed in was that Patricia Wolf seemed to me to have been too kind to some of her characters, letting them survive when I’d expected them to die. Still, that was her call to make.

I’ll be reading, ‘Paradise‘, the next DI Walker book, later this year. I’ll be going with the audiobook version of ‘Paradise‘ as I thought Adam Fitzgerald did a remarkable job with the narration. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.

https://soundcloud.com/bonnierbooksuk/sampleaudioclip

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