Content warning: References to child abduction, the sexual abuse of children, and sexual exploitation generally. It is all referred to in fairly vague terms and is not depicted on the page, but there is a lot of upsetting back story. There is also a subplot that hinges on infidelity.

The Road to Ironbark is two stories in one. At the tail end of the Gold Rush, Aurora Scott, a respectable widow with a less than respectable past, is trying to keep her hotel in business when bushrangers storm the building and take her and the passengers of the last Cobb & Co. coach hostage. Meanwhile, in the modern era, Melody Lawson grapples with an unexpected inheritance that comes with some unwanted and unsettling family secrets.

The two stories are told in parallel, each uncovering a series of mysteries and tragedies. In Melody’s time, Aurora’s disappearance after the siege is the subject of mystery and speculation – a romantic legend that helps Melody’s brother keep the hotel (yes, the same hotel) and the town afloat. In Aurora’s time, the story is still unfolding.

It’s hard to settle on a genre for this book. While the story centres around several mysteries (the disappearance of Aurora, the earlier disappearance of her sister, Melody’s own heritage, and the death of her mother) it is not really a mystery by conventional standards, as most of these mysteries are not solved by the characters themselves. Rather, they unravel naturally as the tale progresses. Both Melody and Aurora have romantic storylines, but I wouldn’t really call this a romance, either, as their relationships aren’t central to the story. It’s probably closest to historical fiction, except for the fact that half the story takes place in the modern era.

There was a lot that I enjoyed about this book. Aurora is a great character – a real survivor, pragmatic, strong, and cautious, but also deeply kind and with a strong sense of responsibility for the people who come to her hotel. The various secondary characters and antagonists in this earlier era are well-drawn; I thought the bushranger, Jim Starky, was especially compelling – complicated enough to be not entirely unsympathetic but also clearly a man very much on the edge, and a very real and frightening threat to Aurora and the other hostages. I liked Aurora’s relationship with Hester, who is her friend and her employee, but who also rather resents Aurora for marrying Mr Scott. With the exception of a couple of very clear villains, most of the characters in this era were an interesting mix of good and bad, and their relationships were layered and nuanced. I liked this a lot.

The mystery surrounding what happened to Aurora and the others involved in the hostage scenario was also well done – while there were some, small, elements I predicted, most of the twists were genuinely surprising, and the story kept a nice level of tension throughout. And while there were some truly horrific backstories in this section, matters ended far more happily than I had anticipated.

In the modern era, things were a little more straightforward, and for me, this part of the story was less successful. I found the characters enjoyable enough, but they didn’t have quite the same depth as those in Aurora’s era, and the plot was a bit too predictable.

Melody herself is a bit younger than Aurora, and has lived a far less traumatic life, and so she is still at the stage of figuring out who she is and what she wants, something that Aurora has pretty much settled for herself. There’s a bit of a love triangle in the modern era, between Melody, her high school sweetheart, Hugh (now Ironbark’s local constable), and Shawn Maddox, the wealthy step-nephew of the man who has mysteriously left his historic goldmine to Melody, and who has turned up in town to look after his stepfather’s interests. (Hmm… sexy, rich, stranger from the city with unknown motives versus (relatively speaking) poor but honest high school sweetheart beloved by everyone in the town… I wonder who Melody will end up with?)

I think one reason that the modern half of the book didn’t work so well for me compared to the historical half is that there were several contemporary mysteries that Melody was trying to figure out, and so the motivations and actions of the people around her had to be a bit more opaque in order to preserve the mystery for as long as possible. This meant we got far less of a sense of who these people were, which was a shame. I also found that there were some relationships, such as the one between Melody’s mother and Anthony Maddox, that just didn’t make emotional sense to me. This was a real pity, particularly given just how complex and convincing the historical relationships were.

In fact, while Melody’s present is haunted by Aurora’s story, it was Aurora’s story that felt real and present, while Melody’s story and era felt like the insubstantial ghost flitting around it.

One thing I did love in the modern era was the re-enactments and other history-themed entertainments Melody’s brother kept devising to entice the tourists. Like every Melbourne schoolchild, I went to Sovereign Hill on school excursions at least every couple of years during primary school, and we panned for gold and went on tours of the mines and learned about the Eureka Stockade and so forth, and the town of Ironbark as depicted here had a lot of that feel – a place where something exciting had happened for which we still had some of the buildings and artefacts, and the perfect excuse to dress up in costumes and run ghost tours to educate and entertain the masses. And of course, we are told that Ironbark is in the Victorian goldfields, which means it probably is somewhere in the general vicinity of Sovereign Hill (I kept on looking for context cues to figure out where it was – there is a place called Ironbark which is now part of Bendigo, and gold was once mined there, but I don’t think it is the Ironbark in this book). So that was fun, and gave me a stronger sense of place than just about anything else in the book.

Here’s the elephant in the room, though. I hate to say this, but I find it difficult right now to enjoy books where one of the heroes is a member of the police force. Hugh is a small town country cop who grew up in Ironbark, and still lives there, and he chose this profession because the local police were very helpful and kind after the death of his father, and he wanted to serve his community in a similar way. He’s clearly all about community policing and positive relationships and all that stuff. But even so, I can’t help thinking about systems of policing, and who and what gets policed, and so forth. There aren’t a lot of people of colour in this book; this probably does reflect the demographic makeup of tiny regional towns in Victoria, but suddenly it feels significant and sinister (why yes, we do have a problem with racism in Australia).

And I don’t know what to do with that, because it’s not really a response to the text, it’s a response to the world in which the text was written. But it still colours how I feel about this book. And given the world we live in, ‘hero is a cop’ does feel like it is a statement that should come with a content warning right now.

Returning to the text itself, The Road to Ironbark is a tricky book to grade. As I’ve mentioned, it sort of falls between genres, and while it does some things very well, there are places where it falls down. It’s the kind of book that I’d describe as sticky – while it wasn’t quite my cup of tea, there is something about it that took hold in some way, so that I’m carrying something of the atmosphere and story with me several days after reading it. That tells me something about the quality of the writing.

I think the best way to approach this is to grade Aurora’s story and Melody’s story separately. Aurora’s story gets an A minus; it’s clever, it’s thoughtful, it’s emotional and it is genuinely haunting. Just beautiful all round. Melody’s story, though… look, it just didn’t do much for me. It wasn’t bad, but it was a bit meh. If I’m honest, I was kind of skimming through her bits to get back to Aurora. Perhaps a C minus for Melody? That averages out to a B minus overall, which seems about right.

Note: This title appears to only be available on the Kindle through Amazon Australia and physical copies are for sale at international retailers.