What if Western Australia had actually been settled as a French colony?  What if goldrush Bendigo had been a hotbed of espionage and international crime?  What if magic and voodoo and psychic powers were bubbling along just beneath the surface? What if …? 

Sophie Masson has used the intriguing possibilities of alternative history to create another Victoria of 1854.  A determined girl, Sylvia Hoveden, arrives in the gold-mad colony searching for her missing brother.  Anje Otsoa, a secret agent from the French settlement of Esperance arrives to track down the kidnapped Count of Tremille.  The two meet in the chaotic scramble of the goldfields trying to discover how the giant Hand of Glory nugget ties their stories together. 

This is part crime thriller, part costume drama, part fantasy and wholly fascinating.  Both Sylvia and Anje must learn and decide who can be trusted as the threads of clues become more and more tangled.  There are echoes of Charles Dickens in the mad scramble of humanity, and of the Wild West in the desperadoes facing each other. 

All the key characters have secret pasts or identities.  Keeping them from each other creates many of the twists and turns of the plot, leaving it to the reader to pick through the trail of what the characters cannot see. 

In some ways, however, there is almost a little too much exotic detail.  Several threads are introduced as clues but then, rather disappointingly, left to drift or fade away.  The mix of cultures is probably the main missed opportunity – an aboriginal tribe sheltering a fugitive, a frightening voodoo sect, the mysteries of Chinatown, all cry out for more involvement in the key parts of the story. But they are left just as background details or passing glimpses.  The story races on, driven by the characters, not the setting.  Sylvia and Anje each make their choices, and also some some hair-raising discoveries.  Things are seldom what they seem. 

The Hand of Glory is an exciting story that creates an intriguing world.  I just wish it had been a hundred pages longer so that some more of its possibilities could have been explored.

Other books by this author:
In Hollow Lands (Hodder, 2004)

Review by David Beagley

© 2002 David Beagley