Truth - A brief Review

I am a little late to the Peter Temple Fan Club. I feel like the doors opened years ago and now I'm the guy who got there late and is trying to catch a furtive glimpse through a dusty and grimy window. Last year I read his book called The Broken Shore and loved the mood and the environment and the ttunnel he put me in where I was watching a movie made only for me. One of those books that I kept close and read snippets in seconds if that was all I had.
     The Broken Shore's semi-sequel Truth is one I picked up last week and remembered everything good about its semi-prequel. The character picture is holistic and visual. The settings and plot create that quiet dread within me that he got there first.
     The style is sparse. Commas for conjunctions. Names for sentences. A word for a paragraph. And yet so much is squeezed into each page that it is little wonder that he won a Miles Franklin for it.
     Inspector Villani is such a flawed and lovable character but he is only one in a role call of likeable people within whom I could recognise failings and impulses and bad judgments.
     A back-catalogue of Peter Temple will shortly be making its way out of stores and onto my to-read pile already stacked with too many books now relegated to second-billing.

Tom