Headland by John Brynes review - This has all the ingredients of a classic rural noir, but dialled up to 11

An outsider arrives in a struggling small town. They've left the big city. The reason isn't entirely clear, but it points somehow to a key character flaw. What seems a simple mystery quickly unravels into a complex web of crime, implicating powerful individuals, or the distrustful community, or the corrupt local council, or all of the above. Red herrings lurk among the lot. The protagonist's troubled past refuses to stay buried, as The Issues - sexism, alcoholism, alt-rightism - are dealt with. The Weather is a Character (or at least an atmospheric metaphor). And then all the elements come together for a final, thrilling, climax, as resolution and redemption are delivered and the bad guys get theirs.

I'm not disparaging a good recipe. Readers (myself included) like to know what they're in for, and authors tend to add their own spice to keep things interesting. In Louise Wolhuter's An Afterlife for Rosemary Lamb, there's not one outsider, there're three. In Dinuka McKenzie's The Torrent, protagonist Kate Miles isn't flawed, she's pregnant. In Chris Hammer's The Tilt, the weather is replaced by a river and man's attempt at controlling it. And in Jane Harper's Exiles, the town isn't struggling; its flourishing allows romance to bloom.

In John Byrnes' debut Headland, the unique "spice" is that each ingredient is dialled up to 11. Detective Constable Craig Watson, protagonist, is also a serious drug addict, popping Oxy, snorting speed, and drinking a bottle of hard liquor every chance he gets. His past - told in flashbacks - is among the most disturbing I have read, featuring several rape scenes and culminating in an unbelievable tragedy. When a red car is implicated in a crime, every subsequent suspect Craig encounters owns a red car. The rain doesn't just inundate the town, it drowns it, with half the novel spent cut off from the outside world and waist-deep in water.

I enjoyed the relentless escalation - how much worse can things get? - and the pacing made for a page-turner as the twists kept coming. Craig's colleagues, Ellie Cameron and Larissa Brookes, also interested me. Their attitudes - towards Craig, their monster of a boss, members of the public - felt nuanced and idiosyncratic. Their decisions kept me guessing (much like Craig was left guessing at times), but that was part of the fun. Ultimately, it all got a bit too much for me, as the amount of abuse (of drugs, of innocents, of police powers) stretched my credulity and turned my stomach.

But others with stronger constitutions and an insatiable appetite for Australian crime should definitely try Headland. Just maybe don't read while eating.