Scrublands

Scrublands is a crime novel by the Australian writer Chris Hammer, published in 2018 and his first. It is set in the fictional town of Riversend in the dry inland of New South Wales, and it is the first book to feature the journalist Martin Scarsden.

A year earlier a local priest shot five of his parishioners and was then shot himself, and the town is still living with the aftermath. Scarsden arrives to write a feature about how Riversend is coping, expecting a straightforward assignment.

Talking to the townspeople, Scarsden finds that the accepted account of the shootings does not fit the facts he can check, and that almost everyone he meets has a reason to prefer the version the town has settled on. The drought, the failing farms and the secrets people are guarding all feed into what he uncovers.

The novel is told in the third person and present tense, and it was followed by two more Scarsden books, Silver and Trust. It was adapted into a television series in 2023.