Summer of Blood (Dave Warner, Fremantle)

Ned Kelly award-winning author and musician-songwriter Dave Warner revisits characters from his 1999 novel Big Bad Blood. Set two years after the events of that book, in 1967, Summer of Blood provides enough context for Homicide Detective John Gordon’s trauma and Arson Detective Ray Shearer’s murky past to be read as a standalone thriller. When Martin, the son of the Australian Minister for Transport, goes missing in San Francisco, the police are too busy with the Summer of Love—a landmark time for psychedelic music, free love and anti-war sentiment in California—so John and Ray are sent to the US to investigate. Once on the trail of the missing Australian college student, the detectives realise Martin had been tracking a serial killer using the music scene as a cover. As John and Ray move across California in their attempts to find leads, witnesses and suspects at concerts and drug dens, they befriend Janis Joplin and immerse themselves in the hippie counterculture. The recurrent short, sharp sentences and use of the present tense throughout are sometimes disconcerting, albeit suggestive of the detectives’ struggle to find the killer amidst a haze of marijuana smoke and acid trips. The technicolour evocation of a revolution in music is vividly realised, and Warner’s passion for the artists energises the novel. With an accompanying playlist, Summer of Blood is perfect for readers wanting to vicariously ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Ilona Urquhart is a Children’s and Youth Services Librarian on the Bellarine Peninsula and has a PhD in Literary Studies. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Category: Reviews