Echuca Library Author Talk

Join John Thompson and Peter Whitelaw, co-authors of River of Secrets, who will chat about how they came up with the idea for the mystery story and their experience of co-writing a novel. 

About River of Secrets:

When a wave of inexplicable fatigue sweeps through a town along Victoria’s Goulburn River, an elderly Echuca GP Dr James Chalmers recognises a pattern his training can’t explain - and the bureaucracy won’t acknowledge. Patients nod off at work; a linesman narrowly survives a high-voltage incident. It feels like coincidence - until it doesn’t.

Enter Charles Aspinall, a retired police detective with an army background whose instincts were honed in places where the official story rarely matches the truth. Old comrades, quiet favours and a stubborn moral compass pull Charles into James’s orbit. What begins as a medical curiosity becomes a hunt through mountains, river bends and corridors, from sleepy surgery waiting rooms to the guarded gates of Puckapunyal.

As the pair travel down the river collecting water samples, they uncover the outline of an alliance that isn’t meant to be seen - one that blurs the borders between public safety and risky projects, between allies and operators. Night convoys on forgotten fire trails. Sights of equipment no one can quite account for. A museum visit that turns into a message, delivered with explosive meaning.

Bound by loyalty to their communities and to a truth that keeps slipping the net, Charles and James navigate obstructive officials, frightened soldiers and the long shadow of decisions made far from country towns. Their partnership - grit and empathy, suspicion and science - becomes the book’s beating heart: a sceptical detective who still believes in honour, and a physician who refuses to accept that “unexplained” means “unimportant.”

River of Secrets is a taut, character-driven thriller about how power moves quietly through ordinary places - and how ordinary people push back. It’s about what flows beneath the surface: governments and influence, and the consequences of treating a community as a test bed. The stakes are intimate and immense at once: the safety of a town, the integrity of a nation, the cost of silence.

Follow the clues downstream. Decide who to trust. And when the river finally gives up what it’s been asked to carry, be ready for an answer that changes everything - without ever quite saying it out loud.