Hayley Scrivenor's Dirt Town a multi-layered thriller

With Dirt Town, Hayley Scrivenor joins the ranks of Jane Harper, Sarah Bailey, Emma Viskic, Shelley Burr and Vikki Petraitis, among so many others, whose novels bring a unique perspective to a story.

In Dirt Town, schoolgirl Esther Bianchi goes missing and her father is the first suspect, as the secrets of the small outback town of Durton are revealed one by one.

In many ways, it's a similar story to Burr's Wake, a young girl gone, a town in turmoil. While Wake is more public, Dirt Town is a more private pain, less a story about violence, more one of hidden anger and discontent.

But what really sets Dirt Town apart from many of the recent publications is Scrivenor's use of multiple voices.

The primary narrators are Esther's mother Constance, herself an outsider; the detective Sarah Michaels, with secrets of her own; and two of Esther's young friends, Ronnie and Lewis. There's also a collective voice, the "we", the children of the town.

"Getting the children's voices right was really important to me as a writer," says Scrivenor.

"We think of childhood as quite an innocent time but, in my experience, I think children are very aware of what's going on, even if they don't always have the language to express it or communicate it.

"Some of the nicest feedback I've had is from people saying I feel like you really take these children and their lives seriously ... and as much as the book is being marketed as a crime book, the story is also this story of the children."

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Scrivenor started developing Dirt Town as part of her creative writing PhD at the University of Wollongong.

She'd always been fascinated by books with collective narration, how different views could shape and turn a story.

"When a group of people tries to speak together it's often because they've been drawn together by some big event or some experience that they share, and I was intrigued by how these views could vary," she said.

There are many novels with collective voices which don't work, even Scrivenor is happy to admit that. What she's done here, however, is clever. It's a device that broadens the character development and drives the plot at the same time.

The different voices thread their way through every layer of the story and the town's history; everyone is connected in some way or another.

By using the voices of the children as the main driver, there's an innocence to the story and it's this aspect of the book that will stick with you long after you've finished reading.