Scrublands Audiobook (Free)

With this searing, “indisputable page-turner” (Associated Press), a town’s dark secrets come to light in the aftermath of a priest’s unthinkable last act—in the vein from the Dry and Where in fact the Crawdads Sing.

In Riversend, an isolated Australian community afflicted by an endless drought, a young priest does the unthinkable: he kills five parishioners before being taken down himself.

A year afterwards, journalist Martin Scarsden arrives in Riversend. His project: to survey the way the townspeople about Scrublands are coping as the anniversary of the tragedy strategies. But as Martin matches the locals and hears their version of events, he begins to realize that the approved explanation—a theory set up through an award-winning analysis by Martin’s personal newspaper—could be wrong.

Just as Martin believes he’s making headway, a shocking fresh crime rocks the city. As the national media flocks towards the picture, Martin finds himself thrown into a whole new secret.

What was the real cause of the priest’s filming spree? And exactly how does it connect to additional fatalities in the area, if at all? Martin struggles to discover the town’s dark secrets, placing his job, his state of mind, and his very life at risk.

For fans of James Lee Burke, Jane Harper, and Robert Crais, Scrublands is normally “a gritty debut…sensitively rendered” (THE BRAND NEW York Times Book Review) that marks Chris Hammer seeing that a stunning fresh voice in criminal offense fiction.