Jock Serong's second novel (his first, Quota, earned him the Ned Kelly Award for First Fiction in 2015) is filled with spare yet luminous prose recalling endless dry summer days punctuated with the sounds of willow smacking the leather. It is also a fine portrait of a small family struggling with more than their fair share of grief and loss.

Darren Keefe has been beaten and shot. He lies in a car boot, hands cable-tied and mouth covered in gaffer, contemplating his (probable) imminent violent end and what has brought him to this point. He tells of his fierce rivalry with and terrible love for older brother Wally, played out in their makeshift cricket pitch in a working class backyard in Melbourne's west during the 70s and 80s.

The Keefe brothers are raised by their single mother, who is unbowed by her husband's desertion and determined that her boys will be professional sportsmen. While Wally becomes the kind of cricketer whose public persona is always measured and perfect, Darren can never seem to side with the better angels of his nature. His ne'er-do-well, larrikin, clown prince behaviour is an amalgam of the kinds of things Australian sporting fans have unfortunately come to know all too well in the last three decades. Despite his poor choices, Darren feels things deeply and when he loves it is with the intensity of a badly-behaved supernova.

The Keefe brothers' love-hate relationship, and the toll it takes on those around them, is beautifully set down here and is a must-read for lovers of cricket and literature alike.

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The Rules of Backyard Cricket is the story of two cricketing prodigies from the wrong side of the tracks. Darren, the narrator, is a gifted tearaway with scant regard for the rules, whereas his older brother Wally is a gimlet-eyed disciplinarian dedicated to his career.

The novel starts with Darren bound and gagged in the boot of a car, heading up the Geelong Road to Melbourne. In each chapter, he reveals a little more of his and Wally's backstory, and how things led up to his current predicament.

This book is best thought of as a "ripping yarn" style of novel rather than a whodunit, as there are few surprises. On that level it's very good, with a pacy plot told in a very engaging style.

Fans of cricket are going to have fun spotting character traits and incidents that Serong borrows; people acquainted with Melbourne's true crime stories are also going to recognise a few allusions. I think this is overdone though, to the point where I really wouldn't recommend this book to people not au fait with, or interested in, cricket.

Whoever designed the cover of this book should be fired; it pretty much gives away the ending ( )

What an unusual book! It starts off with a bang - a guy tied up in the trunk of a car with a gunshot hole in his knee on the way to some place, presumably his death - calmly telling the story of his life, and hopefully how he ended up where he is. That got my attention, but it was downhill for me for over half the book. It was a lot about cricket, a sport I know absolutely nothing about and thought was much tamer than it appears to be in this book. I skimmed over a lot of it, trying to gleam as much as I could about the characters, but I was tempted to give up at times. But my darn curiosity about how he ended up in the trunk won out, although it was hard to continue for so long to get there. I will admit, though, that the conclusion was a surprise. It wasn't a happy ending, people died that I had trouble feeling sorry for, and I felt some pity for the main survivor although he may have been the worst of all in many ways. ( )

Darren Keefe and his older brother Wally had been keen cricketers from a very young age. Hitting the ball backward and forward in their back yard, they learned everything they could while the competition between them was fierce. Their mum was a constant support; a single mother she worked hard to supply them with all they needed to have a happy life growing up.

As the boys grew into men, their propensity for cricket continued. Wally and Darren both ended up in senior teams and while Wally went on to greater heights, Darren became involved in trouble. One of the bad boys of sporting history, Darren got away with a lot. Until the day he didn’t…

What would be the result of that bad-boy life? The bound and gagged body in the boot of the car had a story to tell…and what a story it was!

The Rules of Backyard Cricket by Aussie author Jock Serong was a suspenseful mystery with a fair amount of cricket reference.
And there lay my trouble – I’m not a fan of cricket at the best of times! The actual mystery was relayed in short bursts – the cricketers’ story was much more detailed. But I’m happy to recommend it to mystery fans as I’m sure others will appreciate it more than I did. ( )

A great story, but also read it for the wonderful writing - Jock Serong composes beautiful phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters and ultimately this fabulous book. ( )