The Broken River

Detectives Nell Buchanan and Ivan Lucic are sent to investigate a suspicious death in a former gold-mining town in a remote and lush New South Wales Valley. Wolf Burnside, the dead man, was a prominent local person who had been campaigning to revive the fortunes of the town by investing heavily in renewable energy, the flooded and abandoned mine central to those plans.
With a dual timeline taking us back to a similar time of promised development in the 1990s and some desperate secrets townspeople are keen to keep, this is once again an outstanding outing for this overworked pair of ordinary people doing an extraordinary job of work in some pretty inhospitable surroundings. The sense of place is as always spot on, and I could practically smell the valley and some of the characters who made it their home.
One element of the story is a wee bit stretched and all I can say is that I hope for Buchanan's sake her family tree has now been completely harvested.
You don't need to start with Scrublands and move through the others to get to this, the fourth in a very strong series, but I would recommend it.