What lifts Beams Falling – the title is apparently an obscure reference to Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1929) – from the everyday gumshoe mire is the author’s impressive style; the book is some kind of aesthetic triumph for the genre. It had to be, to keep this reader interested in the predictably shifty characters (mostly caricatures) and largely orthodox themes (like cops who stumble into shoot-outs more times in a week than most do in their entire career). The absence of gratuitous violence is a plus, though firearms are a recurring theme. In particular, the protagonist’s intimate relationship with her police revolver becomes a bit too much when she feels it ‘slung under her arm, bulging like a third breast’.

P.M. Newton’s own former police service presumably informs the narrative, set in the 1990s, but that is not to say this is an especially ‘realistic’ novel. Do people read books like this and come away thinking that they have received some kind of special insight into the world of policing? Anyone who did would certainly never trust a cop again. Nor would they go within ten miles of Cabramatta, which comes across as about as safe as modern-day Damascus.

Regardless, Beams Falling should impress rusted-on fans of the detective novel. It suggests that Newton could soon join the likes of Peter Corris and Peter Doyle as a master of crime fiction, Australian-style.