Unbury the Dead

Image credit: Simon & Schuster Australia

The crime novel is a genre that has been through a plethora of transformations over the years. From the sophisticated detective novels of Conan Doyle to the gritty noir of Chandler, names like Poe, Harris, Christie, Du Maruier, Larsson, Le Carre, Collins, etc. trample over each other as they traverse the genre landscape. When we pick up a crime novel, we are promised a challenge in trying to solve the mystery before the protagonists, as well as the added thrill of a race against time to tie everything up. We expect charismatic characters, immediate intrigue, and (often) a pace that keeps us on our toes. It’s thus, deflating when we get to the end of a crime novel and feel that it hasn’t delivered.

Unbury the Dead follows ‘heroines’ Alice and Teddy: best friends and hired hands with flexible moral boundaries who provide a variety of services from chauffeurs to bodyguards, to private detectives, to crime scene cleaners. Teddy is searching for a missing teenager while Alice is driving one of Australia’s richest men to his final resting place. When their individual cases suddenly collide, sparking a large and sinister mystery, the girls go rogue to find the truth about who is dead who shouldn’t be, who’s alive who should be dead, and how it all ties together.

My overall thoughts on this novel is that it needed flavour. I feel like it maybe could make a very good TV series with the added spice of music, moody lighting, and diverting camera angles. The story, characters, and landscape are perfectly solid, but there is something about the prose that just leaves everything feeling flat and bland. Hardy writes in short, to-the-point sentences, many of which don’t employ the flavour-enhancing power of adjective or adverbs, and while this certainly lets people know what’s happening it doesn’t really lead the reader of a journey: instead it lets you sit still while it just hands you mounds of stuff to hold. It reminded me of Carl Hiaasen’s work, another crime writer with solid stories but a similarly flavourless way of telling them.

But to give credit where it is due, there is enough intrigue in the mystery itself that inspires you to keep turning pages (after persevering with the 150-page setup). Classic genre tricks are employed to encourage the brain to store information and form theories: things like red herrings, repeated incidents, and vague dialogue.

Image credit: Bendigo Writer's Festival

It felt that Hardy was trying to explore the nature of criminals and exploring the nitty-gritty of labelling people into the binary of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ when a person doesn’t really fall into either of those categories. She starts to build on this with internal monologues and emotional self-processing of the heroines during traumatic scenes and it finally comes to a more pronounced head in the story’s third act. Sadly, I feel like this social commentative part of the book just didn’t really gain any traction. Perhaps it’s because the blunt prose also served to dull down the charisma that the girls could have had. You know how Phil Spector was famous for the ‘Wall of Sound’ that managed to bury Tina Turner’s voice in River Deep Mountain High? This is the literary equivalent of that.

As crime novels go, Unbury the Dead leaves a bit to be desired, but it does provide an engaging mystery that does set the brain whirring and pages to turn at a reasonable pace.

Author: Fiona Hardy, 2025

Published: Affirm Press, Melbourne Australia, 2025.