I enjoyed the book, although I wouldn't think it to be a masterpiece. It seemed to me to be a bit dislocated in some way, but not concerning enough to try and analyze why.
Nice to see the many and varied Australian critters having a place in the story, often tightly packed into a couple of sentences:
So they walk silently towards the lower slopes, in single file, each locked in the private world of her own perceptions, unconscious of the strains and tensions of the molten mass that hold it anchored to the groaning earth: of the creakings and shudderings, the wandering airs and currents known only to the wise little bats, hanging upside down in its clammy caves. None of them see or hear the snake dragging its copper coils over the stones ahead. Nor the panic exodus of spiders, grubs and woodlice from rotting leaves and bark. There are no tracks on this part of the Rock. Or if there ever have been tracks, they are long since obliterated. It is a long long time since any living creature other than an occasional rabbit or wallaby trespassed upon its arid breast.
The story did come across to me as a whodunit without a whodidit.
My next venture into Australian "literature" is John O'Grady's (pen name Nino Culotta) comedy "They're a Weird Mob" which I last enjoyed in hardback a few (or even more than a few
) decades ago (but sometimes comedy doesn't last).