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Silver (Martin Scarsden Book 2) by [Chris Hammer]

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Chris Hammer

Silver (Martin Scarsden Book 2) Kindle Edition

by Chris Hammer (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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'Chris Hammer is a great writer - a leader in Australian noir.' - Michael Connelly

For half a lifetime, journalist Martin Scarsden has run from his past. But now there is no escaping.

He'd vowed never to return to his hometown, Port Silver, and its traumatic memories. But now his new partner, Mandy Blonde, has inherited an old house in the seaside town and Martin knows their chance of a new life together won't come again.

Martin arrives to find his best friend from school days has been brutally murdered, and Mandy is the chief suspect. With the police curiously reluctant to pursue other suspects, Martin goes searching for the killer. And finds the past waiting for him.

He's making little progress when a terrible new crime starts to reveal the truth. The media descend on Port Silver, attracted by a story that has it all: sex, drugs, celebrity and religion. Once again, Martin finds himself in the front line of reporting.

Yet the demands of deadlines and his desire to clear Mandy are not enough: the past is ever present.

An enthralling and propulsive thriller from the acclaimed and bestselling author of Scrublands.

Print length

456 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Allen & Unwin
Publication date

1 October 2019
File size

2242 KB
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Silver is the perfect sequel to Scrublands - dark, twisty and atmospheric, with writing so real you can almost feel the blistering heat of the Australian summer. I savoured every page, I didn't want it to end * Lisa Hall, author of Between You and Me * Compelling, original and brilliantly executed - an excellent thriller from a new master of Australian noir * Charles Cumming, author of A Foreign Country * Stunning ... Scrublands is that rare combination, a page-turner that stays long in the memory -- Sunday Times on 'Scrublands' Shimmers ... A tortured tale of blood and loss -- Val McDermid on 'Scrublands' --This text refers to the paperback edition.

About the Author

Chris Hammer was a journalist for more than thirty years, dividing his career between covering Australian federal politics and international affairs. For many years he was a roving foreign correspondent for SBS TV's flagship current affairs program Dateline. He has reported from more than thirty countries on six continents. Chris's non-fiction book, The River, published in 2010 to critical acclaim, was the recipient of the ACT Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Walkley Book Award. Scrublands, his first novel, was published in 2018 and won the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award, as well as being shortlisted for Best Debut Fiction at the Indie Book Awards, and Best General Fiction at the ABIA Awards. It has also been longlisted for the Ned Kelly Best Crime Novel of the Year. Scrublands was optioned for television by Easy Tiger (a FremantleMedia company). Chris has a bachelor's degree in journalism from Charles Sturt University and a master's degree in international relations from the Australian National University. He lives in Canberra with his wife, Dr Tomoko Akami. The couple have two children. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07TNHDYBG
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Allen & Unwin (1 October 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2242 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 456 pages

Best Sellers Rank: 4,242 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 321 in Crime Thrillers (Kindle Store)
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Chris Hammer

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Chris Hammer was a journalist for more than thirty years, dividing his career between covering Australian federal politics and international affairs. For many years he was a roving foreign correspondent for SBS TV's flagship current affairs program Dateline. He has reported from more than thirty countries on six continents. Chris's non-fiction book, The River, published in 2010 to critical acclaim, was the recipient of the ACT Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Walkley Book Award. Scrublands, his first novel, was published in 2018 and was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey Debut Dagger Award, Best Debut Fiction at the Indie Book Awards, and Best General Fiction at the ABIA Awards. It has also been longlisted for the Ned Kelly Best Crime Novel of the Year. Scrublands was optioned for television by Easy Tiger (a FremantleMedia company). Chris has a bachelor's degree in journalism from Charles Sturt University and a master's degree in international relations from the Australian National University. He lives in Canberra with his wife, Dr Tomoko Akami. The couple have two children.

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Top reviews from Australia

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AnneP

You won't want to put this book down

Reviewed in Australia on 24 October 2019

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This is a great book. The descriptions have you in the moment throughout the book. I could taste the fish and chips in the scene at the fish and chip shop! I hope there's another book coming. I have told many people to read Scrublands and now to add Silver to their must read list.

7 people found this helpful

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FANTASTIC CRIME BUT SO MUCH MORE

Reviewed in Australia on 8 March 2022

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So much more than a crime novel. It’s one of the best books I have read in years. What started out as a simple whodunnit turns into a story of mass Murder, drugs, extortion, blackmail and mysteries deeper than the Grand Canyon. The writing is gorgeous, deep, profound and lyrical. For a crime novel, the book is huge. To be honest, the story slowed down in its 2nd quarter but sped up again shortly after as the plot twists hit you. And the biggest mystery of all - the One you didn’t even know existed - is revealed right at the book’s end and it’s like watching Da Vinci finishing his Mona Lisa. This book is a masterwork not just of crime fiction but of literature in general. It’s world class. Australia can and should be proud of Chris Hammer. I know I am.

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Vivienne May Beddoe

Stunning second novel.

Reviewed in Australia on 16 December 2019

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A thoroughly engrossing read. Chris Hammer takes his protagonist from Scrublands back to his home town on the North Coast straight into a vicious murder where his girlfriend is the main suspect.
Moving from the current sleuthing to the past Martin's troubled background is gradually revealed.
The story also moves from the town's concerns - development , drugs, the role of the Indigenous population - to Martin's precarious personal relationships.
The tangled webs are resolved with the revelation of more than one betrayal as implied in the title.

3 people found this helpful

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He’s done it again

Reviewed in Australia on 26 November 2019

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Fans of Scrublands will like this one too. It has an intricate plot involving murders, a bit of drug use and the greed of competing developers in a seaside town. As with Scrublands, the place is well-evoked. You really get the feel of an Aussie coastal town that has its rich people on Nob Hill, its backpacker hostel, its poor white trash and its Aboriginal families who’ve put in a land claim. Then there’s the sea and surfing, the coastal scrubland and the patches of rainforest, the thunderheads rolling in from the south as a southerly buster brings lightning and rain.

Journalist Martin Scarsden is looking forward to settling down in his old home town with his new girlfriend Mandy and her baby son Liam when it all goes pear-shaped. As a journo Martin walks a fine line between helping the police and annoying them. Mandy is a suspect and although Martin is dedicated to clearing her name their relationship is new enough that there’s room for unease on both sides. There’s a rich cast of characters who are very well developed but it’s done so deftly you don’t get them muddled. In between figuring out the various whodunnits Martin faces old demons - the ones he couldn’t wait to get away from when he was eighteen. Very satisfying story telling. Done well, it would be a sizzler of a movie, especially as it has touches of the exotic: a Cretan saint and an Indian swami who leads meditation retreats both feature. Plus Martin has a useful friend at ASIO. As a journo himself Hammer does a great job with the media part of the story.

One person found this helpful

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gary hampson

Hammer does it again

Reviewed in Australia on 24 October 2019

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Silver is a rollicking good mystery that builds on Chris Hammer’s previous bestseller Scrublands. Moving to the coast and away from the bushfires, our hero Martin returns to the seaside town he grew up in. Slow to start, the pace of the novel picks up as the threads from the past and the property developers get involved. Hammer is at his best when plotting the media and journalists into the story. Thoroughly recommended for a summer read by the coast.

4 people found this helpful

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piper

Couldn’t put it down

Reviewed in Australia on 9 October 2019

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This was a great read and really rubbed away at the surface of small town life, but also at the events that shape each of us and bring us full circle back to our roots. It had some great twists to the plot and unexpected ending. Interesting complex relationship also between the police and journalists. I read it in two sittings.

2 people found this helpful

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alan riles

Even Better than Scrublands

Reviewed in Australia on 20 December 2020

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Chris Hammer has me well and truly hooked!
Silver, based on Grafton-Yamba, has a complex but believable plot around real estate development, hippies and drugs, without that one twist too many that did mar Scrubland to some extent. And the coastal setting is so well pictured.
I still struggle as I did with Scrublands to believe that Martin and Mandalay have a long term future together but i guess that is life!
Eager to get to the next one, Trust.

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Meredith Whitford

a very good read

Reviewed in Australia on 17 November 2019

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I ha some trouble following the ins and outs of who was up to what with land developments and crimes and so on, but this was still an absorbing and interesting, very well-written book with well-drawn characters. The author has a real eye for the small things -- tics of behaviour; scenery; fish and chips by the sea, and so on. I hope Hammer continues and makes a series of this and Scrublands.

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Graham G Grant

‘There are things you can’t escape’

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 December 2019

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After completing his book about the bloodshed in Scrublands, the first book in this series, journalist Martin Scarsden travels to his home town of Port Silver to be reunited with Mandalay Blonde and her son. They’ve moved there for respite after the trauma of Scrublands. But their lives are turned upside down again after Jason Speight, Scarsden’s childhood friend, is discovered stabbed to death in Mandalay’s townhouse. She is a suspect and Scarsden must clear her name. He becomes drawn into the secret life of the coastal town: bitter rivalries, property disputes, police corruption... It’s elaborately plotted and richly textured - we learn about Scarsden’s troubled upbringing largely in flashback. It’s a more conventional work of crime fiction than Scrublands, which was a whydunnit, with a novel premise. Scarsden is no longer a full-time journalist, which is a shame - the depiction of reporters in the first novel was unusually accurate for a work of fiction (Hammer was a journalist). It’s a very ‘busy’ novel - crowded with well-drawn characters - and I found the plot occasionally bordered on baffling: it’s labyrinthine. But a combination of the strong sense of place and Scarsden himself - haunted by his past (‘there are things you can’t escape’), a flawed hero - means the novel works, and the momentum increases in the second half (where, happily, there’s also a return to Scarsden’s old life as a newspaper journalist). Not as strong or as compelling as Scrublands, but a very worthy follow-up.

16 people found this helpful

Avidreader

Disappointing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 January 2020

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I ploughed through this book, finding it very heavy going. His first book in this series was much better. There were so many cliches- stunningly beautiful woman with very quirky name is left a substantial inheritance, ace reporter who is fortuitously always on the scene of the murders, but who has a traumatic past to contend with and - amazing coincidence- was brought up in the very town where the inherited house is situated. The plot is convoluted and a bit boring. Not a patch on Jane Harper.

13 people found this helpful

Antenna

A twist too many in the swamps and potions of greed, guilt and revenge?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 January 2020

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Having immersed himself in a book on the complex crimes he helped to solve in the outback town of Riversend, covered in the freestanding bestseller “Scrublands”, hard-bitten former foreign correspondent Martin Scarsden returns after an absence of more than twenty years to his home town of Silver on the east coast of Australia, where his new partner has inherited a dilapidated house in one of the many coincidences on which the novel’s convoluted plot tends to rely.

Gradually, details emerge of the family tragedy which drove Martin to leave Silver at the earliest opportunity, although some missing pieces of the puzzle are not even revealed to him until the final pages. He barely sets foot in town before being diverted from reflecting on the past by the shocking discovery of the body of his close friend from childhood, Jaspar Speight, a local estate agent, found lying in the house Martin’s partner has been renting, making her a prime suspect. In his determination to prove her innocence, Martin becomes involved in the local conflict between speculators out to make money and the native people and visitors to a spiritual retreat wishing to be left free to enjoy the natural beauty of the surf-washed shore where kangaroos graze. In the mesh of sub-plots, there are also recurring themes of revenge and guilt.

As in “Scrublands”, author Chris Hammer is strong on sense of place: “the spotted gums and cabbage tree ferns, the palm trees and staghorns and the cedars trailing vines, bellbirds chiming” in the lingering summer of the subtropical north coast of New South Wales; “the tugging dryness of a drought-ravaged inland left the far side of the coastal plain” –all quite evocative in view of the recent devastating Australian wildfires. He also captures the ambience of a somewhat run-down town with the potential for development, but at the risk of destroying local communities and damaging the environment.

Although the style can be slick and corny at times, Hammer is good at developing Martin’s character to show his changing moods, with his understandable introspection, flashbacks of nostalgia for the past mixed with bitterness, but also his compulsive drive to “get a scoop” even at the cost of appearing ruthless and insensitive (“Seven people dead. And you’re smiling!”), pursuing sometimes dubious means without hesitation in order to achieve an end which is justified if the guilty are caught.

The author puts his long experience as a journalist to good use to show how reporters vie, even within a paper, to be the first get an article published, how they live with the constant fear that a story will turn out to be false, and the risk of losing the trust of colleagues on whom they rely, may even be fired, if they fail to reveal a juicy fact in an attempt to shield someone they love.

Despite moments of high drama, there is too much repetition of banal detail apart from the denouement which ironically seems overly abrupt. The numerous plot twists are often unconvincing or rather confused. The upshot is a novel that alternates oddly between being a page turner and a bit tedious. It did not grip me as much as “Scrublands” which I would recommend reading first (although on reflection this has the same strengths and flaws, so perhaps it was the novelty that hooked me), nor in quite the same league as Jane Harper’s novels also set in Australia.

5 people found this helpful

Rockbiddy

Slow burn that rewards perseverance

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 March 2020

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Having found Chris Hammer’s first book a five star reading experience I was really looking forward to tackling Silver. I thought the strengths of Scrublands were the stunningly vivid descriptions of the dry Australian landscape along with well calibrated plot development - the pieces of the jigsaw emerging steadily throughout the narrative. Silver was disappointing because the first half of the novel was almost all description and after the initial shocking murder, the plot stalled for far too long. There was no diminishing of the author’s ability to conjure up an evocative scene but the prevalence of descriptive passages along with unrelated and unnecessary details, grew wearisome even though well-executed. I honestly feel that had I not enjoyed Scrublands so much, I would have given up well before I reached the end of Silver.
You have to get a good halfway through this long novel before the plot starts moving and once it gets going it really is very good. I would suggest that those who haven’t read Scrublands try the earlier novel before reading Silver as this will provide a flavour of what to expect from Silver after making the initial slog through the turgid first half.

2 people found this helpful

Alice Palance

Gave Up Almost Half Way Through

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 March 2020

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Having enjoyed Scrublands (Chris Hammer's debut novel) for the most part, I started on Silver (the accolade of which brought my attention to the author in the first place). Almost half way through however, I decided to throw in the towel, as going back to the novel was proving more of a chore than a pleasure. Despite initially enjoying the vivid and detailed descriptions of Port Silver, after a few hundred pages or so they became repetitive and lost their allure, and I really struggled to empathize with the protagonist Martin Scarsden, partly because of his relationship with the thoroughly annoying Mandalay Blonde (great name, awful character). If she weren't so physically attractive (a fact that is overly stressed in both novels), there is no way he would be so smitten by such a moody cow, and the lack of chemistry between them is palpable. Reluctantly therefore, and despite reading another review saying that the story really picks up about half way through, I really can't be bothered to persevere at the moment.

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