** spoiler alert ** We once again return to Barker, where Detective Dave Burrows and Constable Mia Worth are the officers caring for their community.

When they get called to an accident of a young farmer who has fallen from a windmill, they begin to question if it was an accident or not. The wife is devastated and is trying to hold herself together for the sake of their daughter.

But when another accident occurs of another young farmer and him being friends of the man who died in the other accident, things aren’t making sense.

Dave and Mia are trying to work out the details as well as trying to protect the community, especially when these accidents have happened.

This story of how friendships can be held together by the past but can cause so much heartbreak of loss of the friendships can cause friction within.


Once again Fleur takes us on a journey of finding the truth within a community that seeks to help one another.

I received this book from #netgalley for a honest and free review of this story.

(3.5 stars)
Despite her extensive catalogue of books, and my interest in Aussie noir, Out in Nowhere is the first Fleur McDonald novel I have read. It's part of a series about Detective Dave Burrows, though to my mind he's a lesser character than his partner, Constable Mia Worth. By and large it's a police procedural, with a nod to the differences in policing between urban and rural areas, and with what happens to how you police once you become embedded and protective of a rural community: "Sometimes saving the family even the smallest amount of pain is good policing."

The biggest theme in the book is the sexism of traditional, conservative, older rural men, which is contrasted to the resilience and capability of the women they marry (yet seem to think they protect): "The men are out in the paddocks and often hours away. You have to be able to deal with whatever comes up."

If you like Farmer Wants A Wife, you'll probably like this book, as it really digs into how women who marry into multi-generational rural families are treated: as outsiders, blow-ins, and gold-diggers: "In-laws will always be outsiders here. No matter how much they're loved or part of the family." This is gussied up in a narrative about loving the land: "Not because we're protecting the assets that past generations have built up, but because this land can't go into the hands of someone who wouldn't love it and can't care for it the way that people who have been brought up on it can."

What I liked is that Out in Nowhere largely works as a standalone novel: you get to know everyone pretty quickly, you're not beset with too much boring interconnection between books, and it's about a crime that's solved within the book. What I didn't like was the loose ends. What really happened to Nicole and Rod's first child? Why didn't we hear about their role in hiding the crime? What was it that Alex didn't know was good for him? This should have been covered in the book, as these were quite developed plot lines that were all left hanging. As a first time reader these omissions do not incline me to salivate for and read the next book, they just makes this one feel incomplete and unsatisfying.