The Diabolus Legacy by Saul Kenneth Falconer
Criminals rule the rough harbor of 1875 Sydney, New South Wales, and the cobblestone streets are bloody. But the blood of a murdered flower girl, her throat savagely cut, is only one of the reasons police Inspector Cormag Macleod drinks too much. An ex-Londoner, he’s haunted by visions of his wife and children who died of smallpox, and the men he’s killed in the Crimean War and the Siege of Lucknow.
The Diabolus Legacy by Saul Kenneth Falconer is a historical murder mystery with excellent depictions of survival on the edge of civilization. Kirkus Independent Reviews calls it a “somber, readable tale of frontier psychodrama,” which accurately describes the internal and external “demons” Macleod battles.
After the culprit in the flower girl’s murder falls to his death as Macleod and his young constable chase him across rooftops, the police commissioner banishes them both to the far-off bush, that barely settled region between the cities and the Outback. Sydney is too dangerous for them now; The Push, a gang of menacing criminals, wants revenge. And there’s been another murder in the countryside. A young woman has been found dead in a churchyard, strangled and bitten, with pieces of flesh missing.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” asks Constable McDermott as they travel by horseback to investigate.
“Most of the evil in this world is in men,” Macleod answers. “We don’t need spirits for evil to be close to us.”
ECHOES OF THE PAST, SPOOKY GOINGS-ON
The bodies pile up, murdered in the same gruesome way as those in London when Macleod was a police officer there. Has evil followed him here? Is the ghost of a man he saw hanged six years ago haunting him now, too? Is he going insane?
Rumors of a wild man howling into the night are confirmed by the local Aborigines. “They have seen this thing that haunts the mountain,” the local magistrate tells Macleod.
Vivid characters include a mix of country police who think of Mcleod and his constable as “the Sydney interlopers” and various townfolk including innkeepers and subsistence farmers raising pigs, cattle, corn and tobacco.
Falconer draws on his own family history to bring the bush to life. His ancestors lived in this region during the time of the novel, and the inn where Macleod stays still stands today. By drawing on family memories and ample historical records, Falconer writes in his author’s notes, “I have attempted to accurately represent life as it was in 1875 … and many of the characters in the novel are drawn from real-life figures.”
Readers who enjoy crime thrillers and historical period pieces with gothic supernatural elements have something more to look forward to. Falconer, who’s also a science fiction/science fantasy author, has a second Cormag Macleod mystery, The Demon Mark, slated for release on February 1, 2022, in which Mcleod and McDermott return to investigate the disappearance of children in the isolated township, “where superstition and fear reign.”
