This is the seemingly incurable social evil of the abuse of children, lost in Australian cities to drug abuse, prostitution, overdoses, murder, in despairing flight from their families, marked as victims for the predators who easily hunt them down. One of Lord’s best novels, Whipping Boy (1992), terrifyingly depicted a paedophile ring comprised of some of Sydney’s leading professional men. Their damaged and doomed targets looked out blankly and helplessly at this world, ‘young faces with dead eyes’. In Shattered, there is a pseudonymous pair of lost children in Kings Cross called Romeo and Juliet, whose deaths will figure offhandedly in a newspaper report; the Ratbag, who now suffers from a different kind of abuse; and two teenage girls, whom Gemma has been hired to find. Maddison Carr is a doctor’s daughter; Jade Finn the child of the dead policeman. Poignantly, they find some support from each other, such as they no longer received from their parents. If they can be rescued, Lincoln – and Lord – know that others will take their places.

Lord’s probing of contemporary Australia finds that its deepest evil is in the torment of children, its saddest circumstance the severing of families. Yet she also has a police procedural to manage, and this time the intricate details of her plotting are deftly wedded to the moral concerns of the novel. There is an engrossing account of forensic investigations. More important is the careful and persuasive insight into the means by which Gemma gradually realises how the crime was committed, how the frame-up was effected, and by whom. Just as well, when one of the key elements of the explanation courts the risible: ‘your husband cut the ear off that bear because it would be saturated with saliva and epithelial cells from Donny’s mouth.’ The climax comes with guns drawn, but also with some resolution of strife. Lincoln remains in play for the next instalment.

Lord has left her heroine with another complication, the discovery of a half-sister who is in the clutches of a sleazy cult. As always, readers are rewarded by Lord with a bounty of stories. But what of the author? The cover of Shattered (for whom Lord has found a new publisher, Hachette Australia) saddles her with a couple of misleading sobriquets: ‘as good as Patricia Cornwell’ and, ambiguously, ‘Australia’s First Lady of Crime’. The first comment is at the very least fair enough. Moreover, Lord has been sufficiently smart not to hang her career – as Cornwell has with Kay Scarpetta – on one character. Female and male protagonists have alternated; Lincoln with Harry Doyle of the Dog Squad. As for the other compliment, Lord has been a serious anatomist of Australian society for decades. For her, crime is the manifestation of a deeper and darker malaise. Feeling this, she is in the distinguished company of the likes of Peter Corris and Peter Temple in their adaptation of crime fiction in part for moral inquiry. Long may they thrive.