Exiles: Jane Harper

“We see what we expect to see.”

Jane Harper’s novel, Exiles, is set in the small town of Marralee, and it’s here that Federal Investigator (Financial Crimes) Aaron Falk returns for a christening. The christening is of the son of Aaron’s longtime friends Rita and Greg Raco, and it was originally supposed to take place a year earlier but was postponed. Last year, Kim Gillespie, a woman with deep roots to the Raco family, disappeared from the annual fair leaving her six week old daughter in a stroller. Kim’s shoe was found in the local reservoir but her body has not been discovered. Her disappearance and probable death is chalked up to suicide and post-natal depression. In some ways the theory fits; she was on medication for depression, but in other ways, it’s a narrative that doesn’t sit easily–especially with Zara, Kim’s teenage daughter from a decades long relationship with Charlie Raco, Greg’s brother. The christening was delayed due to Kim’s disappearance, so here we are a year later.

Falk finds himself sucked into the mystery of Kim’s disappearance. Zara hasn’t moved on, and she’s friends with another local teen, Joel who is mourning the death of his father, Dwayne a local accountant who was killed in a hit-and-run accident a few years before. While the adults in town accept that Kim committed suicide and that Dwayne was killed in a random hit-and-run accident, the two teens, Zara and Josh, are not satisfied. Falk initially dismisses Zara and Joel’s claims, but there are some uncomfortable coincidences and some things that just don’t add up. Both Kim and Dwayne died during festival time. Both Dwayne, and it’s assumed Kim ended up in the reservoir. It took 5 months to find Dwayne’s body, but Kim’s body has never been found. The teenagers are unhappy with how both investigations have been handled and so they discuss their concerns with Falk. Falk never knew Dwayne or Kim but he met Gemma, Dwayne’s widow (Joel’s stepmum) some time back, and while there were sparks, Gemma turned Falk down.

Maralee is a close-knit town where most of the residents grew up together. When Kim left Charlie Raco after several decades of an on-and-off again relationship, she moved to Adelaide and there married Rowan, another Marralee refugee. It’s not exactly that the residents of Marralee picked Charlie over Kim, but Kim drifted away, and all her former friends lost touch.

This is a superior crime novel which explores the aftermath of two different and yet possibly connected crimes. The author excels at conveying the ripple effects of crime–the vast space left by violent death. Many of Kim’s former friends feel guilty about the way they lost touch with Kim in light of what seems to be her suspected suicide, and perhaps that guilt allows them to accept the narrative of suicide. It’s festival time once again; there’s an appeal launched to the fair crowd for any additional information about Kim’s disappearance. The juxtaposition of the fun-seeking festival-goers is set against the daunting theory that Kim, depressed and unable to bear life any longer, abandoned her new baby, exited the festival grounds and leapt into the reservoir. It’s a sobering thought.

Jane Harper doesn’t write cheap thrills here. This is a thoughtful, slow-burn novel which avoids surprises, shock elements and plodding police work. Instead, there’s Falk slowly chewing away at the various possibilities regarding Kim’s disappearance which he aligns with known or hypothetical scenarios. Perhaps because he’s not related to the Racos and perhaps because he is not officially on the case, he is able to ruminate on the niggling doubts about Kim and Dwayne’s cases–doubts which gnaw away at the edges of his mind. There’s something wrong, but Falk can’t pinpoint this deeply embedded feeling that he’s missing something.

With the track ahead clear once more, they walked on, the lights from the rides throwing bright colors onto their faces. Falk turned back to Raco and had opened his mouth when the words simply disappeared. It happened without warning as, in a dormant part of his mind, something stirred. Whatever it was shifted, heavy and stubborn, only to resettle awkwardly. It left behind a mild but distinctly uncomfortable sensation, as though Falk had forgotten something he really needed to remember. He blinked in confusion. What had triggered that?

For those who have read other Harper novels, these are several repeat characters, but it not necessary to read the previous two Falk novels before reading Exiles. I listened to the audio version which was read by Stephen Shanahan.

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The Survivors: Jane Harper

Jane Harper’s intense crime novel, The Survivors is an exploration of the corrosive nature of guilt and the ways in which we cope with loss. The title refers both to a shipwreck memorial set on a rock formation on the inhospitable coastline of a dying Tasmanian community, and also to a destructive storm that claimed several lives from this small town. When the novel opens, physiotherapist Kieran Elliot returns home to Evelyn Bay 12 years after the drowning deaths of his brother Finn and his business partner, Toby. It’s a bitter return for Kieran, who, thanks to a foolish mistake, feels responsible for the deaths of Finn and Toby; he’s blamed and hated himself for years, but he’s back to help his aging parents, Brian & Verity, pack up and prepare for a move to a nursing home. Kieran’s father, once a vibrant, energetic man, now suffers from dementia. Kieran, who brings along his girlfriend Mia and their baby for the visit home, really had no idea just how much his father’s condition had progressed, and coming home has been painful.

Some residents still consider Kieran responsible for the drowning deaths of Finn and Toby, but Kieran has a few mates from his youth, including Olivia, Sean, and Ash to hang out with. Shortly after Kieran’s return, Bronte, a young art student from Canberra, who is working temporarily at Evelyn Bay, turns up dead on the beach, and her murder reawakens the disappearance of 13 year-old Gabby Birch, Olivia’s sister, 12-year before. Bronte’s murder brings all the poison from the past floating to the surface, and there are some in town who connect Kieran’s return to the crime. Other residents in this close-knit community would prefer to believe that the murderer is a tourist–not a resident. During the murder investigation, a detective begins to look into Gabby’s disappearance. Gabby vanished the day of the terrible storm which claimed the lives of Finn and Toby. Everyone, except Trish, Gabby’s mother, assumed that she had been drowned since her backpack was found washed up on the beach. In essence Gabby’s disappearance was incorporated into the storm and the drowning deaths. But the murder of Bronte causes some to question Gabby’s disappearance. Did she drown? Was she also murdered? Is Bronte’s murder somehow connected to Gabby’s disappearance?

There are not many characters in this brooding atmospheric novel. There’s a handful of Kieran’s friends, Kieran’s parents, Gabby and Olivia’s grief-stricken mother, a couple of people who work at the barely viable business, The Surf and Turf, a few policemen (the town’s police station is about to be closed,) and a writer who moves to Evelyn Bay only to encounter hostility when he trashes the landscaping of the home he bought.

Intense landscape descriptions have never been a thrill for me, but here in Jane Harper’s capable hands, the landscape is inseparable from the characters and the crimes. While the sea is beautiful, it’s also deadly, menacing and threatening. This is the essence of Nature, of course; it can be unpredictable, but what about human nature–the sense of imminent menace continues on land. This is a community where everyone knows everyone else; they’ve all grown up together, and in theory there are few secrets.

The mystery of Bronte’s murder and Gabby’s disappearance are seminal to this environment and its incubated simmering, brooding violence. Evelyn Bay is a stunningly beautiful yet miserable place-a place with a tourist attraction that commemorates death, and a diving business that lures tourists into revisiting death and tragedy. Kieran and Mia escaped, and the friends who remained behind are permanently stunted by the area’s oppressive, limited economy. The descriptions of the ocean are the most powerful I’ve ever read and they are matched by the descriptions of relentless grief–grief which ravages lives and snatches away any hope of peace. We all accept that grief is a normal, natural process, and yet here we see various versions of grief. Grief is a personal personal journey. Why are some aspects of grief socially acceptable while others are not? Gabby’s mother, Trish, never believed that Gabby drowned during the storm–she believed that her daughter’s body would have washed up somewhere is that had happened. But her theories and persistence have marginalized her and she’s labeled as a broken record, a sad nut case. She identifies with Bronte’s mother and argues that, once the anger has passed, she’ll end up “doing her own secret crazy things like the rest of us.”

“It never changes, you know. Even when they’re older. You’d take a bullet for someone who won’t even wave to you at the school gate. Then suddenly they’re ripped away and..” Trish shrugged.

The drownings, the murder and the disappearance–they have impacted all the town’s residents in various ways. The ravages of grief and the ravages of Time: Police Sgt Renn, who 12 years ago had been “fresh-faced and overeager to please” is permanently damaged by the unsolved mystery of Gabby Birch. The plot plays with the notion of various suspects and the ending was impossible to guess.

I listened to the audio version which was read, marvelously, by Stephen Shanahan.

The beach below was a thin strip, small enough that Kieran immediately felt uneasy. Out to sea, the waves lapped high at The Survivors. All around him, the birds bristled and flapped.

(And if you read this highly recommended book, IMO the crimes were ‘motive-sanitized’ by the perp.)

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Black Tide: Peter Temple

Black Tide, the second Jack Irish novel, finds Jack still working as a lawyer/debt collector/finder of missing persons/hobby cabinet-maker. For those who have not read the first book Bad Debts, Jack Irish was a successful criminal lawyer until a pissed-off client murdered his pregnant wife. From that point, life was all downhill for Jack, but he was eventually pulled from purgatory by his former law partner, Andrew Greer. Jack is still broken–some things can’t ever be fixed, but he’s functional–in an alternative kind of way.

Black Tide opens at a funeral with Jack and his “occasional employer,” Cyril Wootton. Gangster George Armit is dead. A funeral is hardly a place for humour but the author pulls it off, and this is a perfect example of the type of humour you find in these pages:

It was a small affair. Almost everyone George had known was dead. Many of them were dead because George had had them killed. As Cyril wryly notes, the mourners are the “most relieved lot I’ve seen since the plane out of Vietnam.”

The main plot of the novel concerns Des Connors, a man who knew Jack’s father, who comes knocking on Jack’s door,

“Looking for me?” I asked. 

He gave me a looking over with clear bluer eyes. “Jack Irish.” Not a question.

I nodded.

He sniffed. “Don’t ya keep office hours?”

“Called out urgently,” I said. 

“Should have put a note on the door.”

He carried on eyeing me, the look of a talent scout. A faintly disappointed talent scout. “Spit of yer old man,” he said. “Bag as. And the face. Bill was pretty hard though.”

I looked down at myself, gained no pleasure from the experience. “Well,” I said, “I’m a bit older than he was.”

The man thought about this. “Still,” he said.” Bit soft.”

No immediate way to controvert this statement occurred to me.

Des has, apparently, come to make a will, and Jack asks if he has children. This opens the conversation to include Des’s second son ex-copper Gary who is, according to Des, “smart but rubbish.” Des lent Gary 60,000 dollars with the promise he’d “double the money” in three weeks through buying shares. Two months have passed with no sign of Gary. But that’s not the worst of it. Des’s wife willed the house to Gary ,and Gary took an 80,000 mortgage out on the house and Des is about to be evicted. And that’s how Jack, who’s big on settling debts and obligations, get’s involved and starts looking for Gary who, as it turns out, is neck deep in some very nasty business.

As always, there’s a sub-plot involving racing and there’s also Jack’s private life which we can’t forget. He hangs out at the local pub and follows the local football team. The oldsters who sit on the stools seem planted there and are always full of opinions. The woman Jack became involved with in Book 1, Bad Debts, reporter Linda, has debunked to greener career pastures and Jack is missing her… sort of. I didn’t like this one as much as Bad Debts but it’s always fun to ride along with Jack Irish–no matter the destination. And if you haven’t watched the TV version, it’s well worth checking out.

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Bad Debts: Peter Temple

“One thing practicing law gives you is a feeling for some kinds of truth.”

I’ve been meaning to read the Jack Irish novels for years, but then I watched the series which featured the marvelous Guy Pearce as the title character. Guy Pearce IS Jack Irish–he’s excellent in the role, so good in fact that I started to wonder if I should skip the books.

Roll on to Bad Debts, the first book in the series: I was in the mood for some light crime, and Jack Irish seemed the perfect choice.  First for those who haven’t seen the series, Jack Irish was a successful criminal lawyer until his wife was murdered by a pissed off client. Then he sank into an alcoholic haze. “It was the beginning of the forgotten zone,” and when he hit rock bottom, Jack’s former law partner, Andrew Greer “pulled strings” to get Jack “off a variety of charges.”  Jack lives in Fitzroy and only does very minor legal work; most of his income comes from “collecting serious debts or finding witnesses.”

I found Edward Dollery, age forty-seven, defrocked accountant, big spender and dishonest person, living in a house rented in the name of Carol Pick. It was in a new brick-veneer suburb built of cow pasture west of the city, one of those strangely silent developments where the average age is twelve and you can feel the pressure of the mortgages on your skin.

Eddie Dollery’s skin wasn’t looking good. He’d cut himself several times shaving and each nick was wearing a little red centered rosette of toilet paper. The rest of Eddie, short, bloated, was wearing yesterday’s superfine cotton business shirt, striped, and scarlet pajama pants, silk. The overall effect was not fetching.

This is how the novel opens, I swept right into Jack Irish’s world and was delighted to hang out in his company for the course of the novel. The plot involves the death of an ex-client, McKillop, a man who approaches Jack pleading for help, but before Jack makes contact, the man is shot dead by police. Jack begins digging with a low grade curiosity and a twinge of nagging guilt. The dead man was one of the last people Jack represented during his black alcoholic phase; he remembers little of the case and so it’s with a sense of tenderly, tentatively probing this awful time in his life that he begins to ask questions. Soon he’s warned off the case which, of course, only fuels Jack’s quest. In a way Jack feels as though he owes McKillop something and this feeling, a debt not paid, propels Jack forward.

As always with a series PI (and that’s basically what Jack is at this point–that and an amateur woodworker) the story vacillates between the character’s personal and private life. In Bad Debts, the story moves between Jack’s various jobs, so one plot thread finds him digging into lucrative gentrification contracts, while another plot thread finds him hanging out with Cameron Delray, the understated “enigmatic footsoldier,” who works for diminutive Harry Strang, a horse racing enthusiast. Wily Strang frequently employs Jack Irish for a range of jobs.

Bad Debts is loaded with marvelous characters: there’s the three senior citizens who appear to be glued permanently to the stools of the local pub “nursing glasses of beer and old grievances.” There’s also Stan the publican and Senior Sergeant Barry Tregear–a man who constantly eats fast food messily, and “looked two slabs of beer away from fat.” All these characters appear in the series. It’s in this novel that Jack meets reporter Linda. She was a character I disliked intensely in the series: too holier-than-thou for my tastes, and she seemed a bit mismatched for Jack’s low-key, understated, damaged yet slightly slippery character. In the novel, she’s more relaxed and interesting. If you enjoy horse racing or football, you will have additional plot elements to interest you, but for me, Jack’s world vision is the best thing in the book. There’s something about that sense of humour that lets you know what lowlifes people really are without that sort of reflected back judgement which always taints:

He was an ex-cop called Col Boon, pensioned off the force for extreme hypertension after shooting another cop during a raid on an indoor dope plantation in Coburg. A tragic mistake, the coroner said. I suppose in some ways it’s always a tragic mistake to shoot the man who’s rooting your wife every time you’re on nightshift and he’s not. 

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Big Little Lies: Liane Moriarty

I watched season 1 of Big Little Lies, and while it was entertaining, there were a couple of things that bothered me. How could someone in Jane’s income bracket afford to live in affluent Monterey? And I couldn’t see Rich-Mos like Renata and Celeste making friends with Jane, so I decided to see how the book handled these troublesome details. The book, it turns out, is set in Australia. 

But for those one or two people who don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll start at the beginning. Big Little Lies (the book) is set in the coastal town of Pirriwee, and begins with some horrible event. At first it’s not clear what has happened but we are given clues through the narrative and also through a series of interviews with the police. It’s then we learn that a murder has occurred on Trivia Night–an annual fundraiser which takes place at the school. Murder at an elementary school fundraiser? It boggles the mind. (Well there was that cheerleading thing in Texas….). Then the book goes back in time to six months before Trivia Night and moves forward. 

The main gist of the story is the arrival in Pirriwee of Jane, a young single mother who has moved to this Australian coastal town with her 5 year old son Ziggy. On Orientation Day she meets Madeleine, the driven, outgoing alpha mother who’s married to Ed and has three children: 14-year-old Abigail (from a failed first marriage to Nathan). Fred and Chloe are her children with Ed.

All the trouble starts when Amabella, daughter of the wealthy Renata Klein says someone choked her, and then in front of the entire class, when prompted by the teacher, she points at Ziggy as the culprit. When school begins, Amabella is continually bullied, unobserved by the teachers, and one parent organizes a petition to boot Ziggy from the school. Opposing factions coalesce on the for/against side. 

While the furor surrounding Ziggy is ostensibly the main thrust here, it’s a segue into the lives and culture of the parents. Certain children are popular. “Walking into school with Chloe was like walking arriving with a golden ticket,” and those sort of status relationships continue into adulthood; Renata for example has Harper for a groupie. Main characters are Jane, Madeline, Renata, Celeste (a woman who seems to have it all),  and if we drop back a bit there’s Bonnie, Nathan’s new wife. As the plot unfolds, it’s clear that Jane isn’t ‘just’ a single mother–her child Ziggy is the result of an unsavory encounter Jane had with a stranger–an encounter which has permanently damaged her. 

The novel tackles the subject of female friendship and competitiveness. Renata and Madeline, who are complete opposites, are natural antagonists. You have to laugh at the mothers who organise a support group for “parents of gifted children.” And of course, the group rubs those who don’t belong the wrong way.

Madeline imagined them all sitting in a circle, wringing their hands while their eyes shone with secret pride.

For those who’ve seen the series (I’ve seen  series 1 & 2) there are some differences in the storylines. The book-version of Madeline is not as well off as she’s portrayed in the TV version, and her screen story is much more developed than in the book. I can see why Madeline’s screen story is developed as she’s a fantastic, witty, tart-mouthed character. Jane’s encounter with the father of Ziggy is also quite different. I’m not sure why the series version was altered from the book version–possibly because the book’s version of events is rather more complex.

Anyway, this was an entertaining read and my favorite sections concerned Madeline’s observations of Nathan and his new wife. It’s particularly galling for Madeline to see her ex Nathan and his second wife and their child at Pirriwee school. He walked out on Madeline when Abigail was a baby and provided no support. Now he appears to be a nauseatingly “upgraded version,” of a husband and father, going to Yoga, volunteering for the homeless. To Madeline, Bonnie who is into “yoga and chakras” and who probably gave “organic blow jobs,” doesn’t seem like a real person:

Even though she’d known Bonnie for years now, even though they’d had a hundred civil conversations, she still didn’t seem like a real person . She felt like a caricature to Madeline. It was impossible to imagine her doing anything normal. Was she ever grumpy? Did she ever yell? Fall about laughing? Eat too much? Drink too much? Call out for someone to bring her toilet paper? Lose her car keys? Was she ever just a human being? Did she ever stop talking in that creepy, singsong yoga teacher voice? 

While this may seem like a ‘beach read’ (and it is highly readable, btw) there are a lot of truisms here. Bullying, dominance, status, parenting and control are all examined here, and author Liane Moriarty knows how to weave suspense. When the book opens, it seems entirely possible that the violence on Trivia Night exploded between some of the mothers, and the tension between Renata’s supporters and Madeline’s supporters could certainly, plausibly, reach the level of violence, but for those of us who’ve seen the series, we know the violence has another root cause. 

Resurrection Bay: Emma Viskic

Emma Viskic’s Resurrection Bay, a novel about organised crime and police corruption, is published by Pushkin Press Vertigo, and it’s the first in a series featuring Caleb Zelic. Private Investigator Zelic and Frankie Reynolds, his alcoholic, ex-cop partner specialize in corporate security, and they are hired to investigate a string of warehouse robberies with net losses in the millions.  When the book opens, “Gaz” Senior Constable Marsden, who was moonlighting for Zelic “earning a bit of extra cash,” is brutally executed in his home.

It had been a flash of fuck-I’m-good inspiration over Friday-night beers with Gaz. A solution to a job that was way too big for them. One that Frankie had tried to talk him out of accepting. Why the hell hadn’t he listened to her?

Zelic, who is deaf, received a panicked text from Gaz right before Gaz was murdered, and Zelic is the one who finds Gaz’s brutalized body.  As Frankie and Zelic dig into the case, trying to find a connection between the robberies and Gaz’s murder, they meet a terrified witness. It soon becomes clear that they are on the scent of something big….

Zelic, Frankie and Zelic’s ex-wife team up to solve the robbery case and Gaz’s murder. It’s one of those situations where they have little choice. The police are hostile and smell a connection between the murder and Zelic’s drug-dealing brother, and so Zelic and Frankie are squeezed into continuing the investigation even though they are being warned off. Whoever is behind Gaz’s murder makes sure that Zelic and Frankie feel intimidated; they’ve made someone very nervous–someone who doesn’t like loose ends.

Zelic’s deafness, obviously, in his line of work, presents some unique challenges. Viskic shows the casual cruelty heaped upon the disabled, and how Zelic has learned to cope with nastiness, prejudice and the inference that his deafness is often equated with mental deficiency. We also see how Zelic’s deafness has spurred the development of other skills-including the realization that he’s often underestimated.

How to read people’s hands and eyes. How to know when a sideways glance meant he should run, when it meant he should throw the first punch.

Resurrection Bay is getting a lot of good press. With an emphasis on action, the book swerves into thriller territory, which isn’t my favourite crime presentation.  I’ve been impressed with Pushkin’s Vertigo line of crime reads, but contrary to popular opinion, I wasn’t wild about this novel. I guessed one of the major baddies from almost the beginning of the book, and then the whole ex-wife thing seemed a little cliched.

This is my second entry in the 2018 reading Australian Women Writers Challenge.

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Crucifixion Creek: Barry Maitland

Crucifixion Creek is the first novel in the promised Belltree Trilogy written by Barry Maitland and featuring Homicide detective, army vet, Harry Belltree. Belltree is the son of Australia’s first Aboriginal judge of the NSW Supreme Court who was killed along with his wife in a mysterious car accident three years previously. There’s just one clue that festers in Belltree’s brain–a swipe of white paint on his parent’s demolished car and a “patrol car reported seeing a white tow truck further down the highway.” Everyone tells Harry that he needs to move on, but his brother-in-law, builder Greg, suspects that the reason Harry became a homicide detective resides in the deaths of his parents.

The novel opens with a hostage situation which ends badly in Crucifixion Creek, but this is just one in a series of incidents which take place in the drab, mostly deserted neighbourhood inhabited and dominated, with just a few exceptions, by a Bikie Group known as the Crows. One of the murders drags Detective Belltree, already under a cloud in the department, under closer scrutiny “for a fitness for duty assessment,” but it’s ambitious reporter Kelly Pool who works for the Bankstown Chronicle who begins to connect the seemingly random events.

With Belltree very personally involved in one of the murders, he steps beyond orthodox police work and begins a parallel investigation of his own. This involves his wife, Jenny, blinded in the same accident that killed Belltree’s parents. Before the accident, Jenny was a researcher for a law firm, and now with a special computer, she still works part time from home. Belltree, driven by the imperative to investigate the connection between the recent killings and the murder of his parents, relies on his wife’s computer skills.

This brings me to the one beef I had with this novel. I can understand someone being a whiz at computers, but Jenny’s abilities strain credulity–some of it I could buy but some of her hacking seemed to exist to further the plot, so much so that I almost abandoned the novel. It’s to the novel’s sheer readability that I pushed on, and I’m glad I did.

Strong on atmosphere and characterization, Crucifixion Creek argues that we never really know anyone or just what they’re capable of. Belltree has a number of revelations regarding his brother-in-law, Greg March, a man who appeared to have a lucrative business and plenty of money, yet Greg, who maintained an affluent lifestyle in an architectural wonder of a magazine-worthy home, had many problems which all began and ended with money. Greg March’s accountant may or may not be bent, and here he is in a poky, smelly little office–another character who’s making ends meet and who may be open to making money on the side.

The accountant’s office is in a suburban shopping centre, above a fast food outlet. Sam Peck is a small, rotund, cheery man and he has a bag of golf clubs sitting in the corner of his office, like a promise to himself. This, together with the smell of old grease that seems to have saturated everything, does little to fill Harry with confidence.

This is a very dark, tense, fast-paced crime novel, a story of twisted power and absolute corruption with blurred lines between conflicting loyalties, justice and the law. Belltree never hesitates to cross those lines; there’s no moral quibbling as he plunges into the very personal investigation of his parents’ death. Initially his brutality is shocking, but it meshes perfectly with the rest of the novel.

While this story of shady moneylenders, crooked politicians and meth-dealing bikies ends, it’s clear there are still loose ends for Harry Belltree to pick up in book 2. I’m in.

Review copy.

The Refuge: A Confession by Kenneth Mackenzie

“This thought brought my mind back to the vision of night stretching ahead, as certain and as mysterious as a wet and unknown road stretching beyond the delimiting headlights of a car driven by a stranger. It led somewhere”

Kenneth Mackenzie’s novel The Refuge, set in post WWII Sydney, is narrated by middle-aged crime reporter Lloyd Fitzherbert who is working late one evening, reluctant to go home because he’s expecting a call from the police regarding a body that will be found in the harbour. While the body will be identified and thought a suicide, Fitzherbert knows the truth; as the murderer, post crime, pre-discovery of the body, he tells us he “had waited for that hour, with, as I thought, no feelings whatever.” Fitzherbert with cold calculation, has murdered a young woman he loved named Irma–a refugee from war-torn Europe who sought ‘refuge’ in Australia. Recalling the crime, he “felt again the terrible emotion of triumph mixed with and outweighed by black and utter despair.”

There’s no small amount of irony that Irma, a very slippery, beautiful and exotic young woman who joined both the Communist and the Nazi parties pre-WWII, making deadly enemies of both, should find a different type of final ‘refuge’ in an Australia which proves to be more deadly than the Communist agents that pursue her. This is a tale of an unhealthy bond between two people who appear to be in perfect control of their emotions, and yet when it comes to passion and love, there is something dead or missing in both Fitzherbert and Irma’s emotional make-up. He’s opted, after the tragically early death of his wife, to lead an emotionally sterile life and devote himself to his only son, Alan, who’s raised by his grandmother. Fitzherbert carefully maintains a distance from his son, but his devotion towards him includes morbid thoughts. Here he worries about 8 year-old Alan  growing up in a world at war:

how profound had become my mistrust of a world in which wars could still come into evil flower, and in which individuals could play with and brutally alter the myriad personal fates of whole nations of men and women. In such a world I thought I could find plenty of cause to be concerned for Alan; in such an insane, dangerous world, where the very soul, unawares, was vulnerable, I could impersonally imagine a father willingly and painlessly ending the life of a son before that life should fade and fray into the common background pattern of greedy passions and deliberate violence which is also the pattern of inevitable self-destruction.

Irma, part of the chaotic detritus of pre-WWII Europe floats into Fitzherbert’s sterile existence and he falls in love with her. Irma is a very young woman who’s led a life using her body for political gain and also for survival. When she meets Fitzherbert, he’s the next male stepping stone, and while common sense should tell him to tread cautiously, there’s a magnetic attraction which he cannot resist even though he’s initially repelled:

What I did feel was a sense of shock and disappointment, that so much youth and vitality and feminine beauty should have been so well-schooled in the mouthing of spiritless clichés; for I could not then and cannot now believe that the passion for their maggot-eaten homelands which these people so readily put into words is a real passion of body and mind and spirit, and not largely a guileful parade of perfected artifice. What I did believe is that they were profoundly glad Australia did exist and was there unguarded for their exploitation.

The Refuge is Fitzherbert’s confession, and that leaves the reader as the judge and jury. The tale moves backwards from the discovery of Irma’s body, back ten years before when Fitzherbert met Irma for the first time and, as her savior of the hour, became involved in her life. Neither Fitzherbert nor Irma are particularly sympathetic or attractive characters, and once involved, it’s clear that they are both out of their depth. In spite of warning signals, Fitzherbert plunges deep into this relationship with a much young woman who trades her body for favours, and Irma treads dangerous waters when she begins a relationship with Fitzherbert, a type of man she’s never known before.

In the introduction, Nicholas Rothwell addresses the novel’s flaws and asks, “Can a work of genius, a masterwork–a classic–be imperfect, flawed in its essence? Can a great book be made from unbalanced or ill-fitting parts, and can those flaws and quirks actually be the crux of its strength?” These are good questions which ultimately, each reader will ask as they read The Refuge. It is a stunning book, full of the most incredibly beautifully written sections in which Fitzherbert’s lonely, painful observations ooze through the pages. While I found myself highlighting quote after marvelous quote, I also experienced no small amount of frustration with Fitzherbert’s wordy, unfocused confession/justification of his crime. In the final judgment, however, the power of Mackenzie’s heart stopping writing overrides the novel’s flaws, and his narrator’s meandering approach towards his confession grants insight, arguably more than Fitzherbert intended.

The novel’s structure is unusual–presenting a crime committed by the narrator who then proceeds to languidly detail select parts of the ten years before the murder and the events that led up to this act. Fitzherbert is in no hurry to wind up his tale, so, for example, he’ll spend pages describing the structure of his son’s face, and pages recalling discussions he had with a workmate–although that may seem to have little to do with the tale. But Fitzherbert is telling his tale his way, and explaining, with painfully long detail at times, his emotional justification for his crime. Fitzherbert’s idiosyncratic method of telling his story allows the reader glimpses inside the mind of obsessive man whose morbid thoughts dominate his actions. Fitzherbert methodically builds his case that his actions are justified and ultimately the only option available, but the reader knows that that simply isn’t true. Of course, one intriguing question must be asked: Is Fitzherbert, always in control of the narrative, as honest with himself as he appears to be? When the book opens, he presents himself as a man who has adjusted to the brutal nature of the world, but there are some vital components missing, and this absence floats to the surface when he falls into a one-sided love affair with Irma:

No one would describe me as a nervous man. Years of police reporting give necessary control of all emotion, not merely a command of the show of it. I have seen men hanged, and the raped and mutilated bodies of young women, and children’s bodies that fire has burned, and drowned people on whom fish have been feeding; and for such sights great calmness of spirit is essential One does not even allow an inward weeping for pity, or for shame at being oneself a man. One looks, and makes notes, and forgets. Nervousness does not come into it.

Rothwell describes The Refuge as a tragedy, and if we accept it as such, then Mackenzie’s approach to what may seem like a crime novel, makes much more sense. Fitzherbert is a murderer–an Othello without Iago, and he’s murdered the woman he loves. Now, in the lonely post-mortem of his crime, he explains and dominates the back story of the rocky, fateful path that led, inevitably, to this point.

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One Boy Missing: Stephen Orr

Stephen Orr, the author of One Boy Missing also wrote The Cruel City: Is Adelaide the Murder Capital of Australia? The latter book covers the more infamous cases that occurred in Adelaide, and one of those cases is the 1966 disappearance of the three Beaumont children. And it’s one of the reported sightings of the Beaumont children I thought of when I read One Boy Missing, for the novel begins with a man witnessing a strange occurrence; he sees a small boy, dressed in pyjamas, being thrown into the boot of a car. The man, a local butcher, is so stunned by what he sees, at first he can’t compute it, wrestling various scenarios around his head until he calls the police.

Detective Sergeant Bart Moy is the small coastal town of Guilderton’s only detective, so he’s the man who starts investigating the event. Orr depicts Guilderton as a dull, oppressive, poverty-stricken town–the sort of place you can live for forty years and still be considered an outsider. Right away Moy struggles with inconsistencies about the case–no one is reported missing; all boys in that age group are accounted for. The case begins to eat away at Moy for personal reasons. Moy has returned to Guilderton, a ruined, depressed man, after the death of his only child and his divorce. He’s there, ostensibly, to take care of his aged father George who lives in independent squalor, and since this is a small town where everyone knows each other, Moy’s neighbor persists in bringing over unappetizing casseroles in a relentless “Catholic mission” to make sure Moy eats.

Moy glimpsed his face in the wing mirror. He was getting fat, he knew; he’d lost his chin, gained a blush on his cheeks. He didn’t care anymore. He’d passed into his forties with little or no fuss: the stomach had arrived, the trainer-bra boobs along with a sort of giblet effect under his arms, but his legs were still strong, his buttocks tight, his mind sharp. Growing old didn’t bother him; the glib childhood promises of career and wealth had long since given way to gas bills and self-pollution. Now life was just movement–a slow progress through the world in the dawning realization that you were stuck with your own company for the rest of eternity.

Moy is seen as a “curiosity, a ‘boomerang,’ “–someone who managed to get out of Guilderton but who has now returned. The narrative creates an incredibly strong sense of place; this really is a miserable town with a depressive atmosphere, and at one point, Moy acknowledges the best course of action for outsiders who live in Guilderton, is to embrace one’s fate.  To him, “the message was clear: just do your time. Survive, marry a local girl and buy something decent, or piss off.”

As Moy left the town behind the road turned to gravel. The houses along Creek Street started spreading out. Dead orchards and wrecking yards; chooks, and a few sheep. These were the backblocks: fences overgrown with prickly pear, goats that hadn’t been shorn in years, whole yards full of door-less fridges and lidless washers, children that ran mostly naked through forests of salvaged fence posts.

Moy had visited a family on Creek Street a couple of months back. There was no father and the mother would tie a rope around the three-year-old boy’s leg and tether him to the front porch when she went out. A neighbor, sick of the crying, had eventually called the police. Inside the house Moy had found an old box with a rug, a bottle for the boy to piss in and a scattering of shit left by the family of rodents that helped him eat the food left for him every second night.

Moy is initially mystified by what he calls this “non-case.” No child has been reported is missing, yet from the above quote, we understand that what some families consider ‘normal,’ is far from it, so is this case a domestic abuse scenario rather than a stranger abduction? Moy begins to wonder if the butcher really saw what he thought was an abduction, but then the boy is found, silent and obviously terrified. Where did he come from? Why has no one stepped forward to claim the child?

It would be wrong to say that One Boy Missing gives the sense of the Wild West because there’s no ‘wildness’ here–but the strong impression of an isolated town with a sole detective evokes a tamer, yet more dysfunctional version of the old cowboy West.  Moy’s superior, Superintendent Graves, is just a disembodied voice on the phone. This is a town where the social and cultural gravity of the place overpowers any individual ambition. Moy lives in neglected and decaying government housing that you don’t want to fix as repairs only increase the rent. With almost no social services, and without the spectre of inspection and investigation, standards have slipped into oblivion. The Chinese restaurant is symbolic of everything that’s wrong with this town: even though people know that there’s a good chance they’ll get food poisoning if they eat there, they still, in a despairing acceptance, patronize the place. They accept the risk and plunge ahead as though food poisoning is normal and acceptable.

Guilderton had nothing resembling a health inspector. Apparently teams were sent from town to spend their days trawling the pubs and takeaways. Ineffectually, since he always got sick.

Just as Moy gets food poisoning from the local Chinese restaurant, it also strikes the town’s social worker, so with her down for the count, Moy takes the boy home. Because the boy is close in age to Moy’s dead son, the case is close to the detective’s heart, yet it’s a fine balance between questioning the boy for information and possibly damaging him further. The novel loses some of its pacing when Moy is forced to bide his time in the hopes that information leaks from the boy gradually, and the conclusion seemed a little rushed. But apart from that, this is a riveting crime novel for its incredible sense of how the environment impacts the town’s inhabitants.

He cruised the length of Gawler Street, a succession of creambrick government houses full of teachers, nurses and coppers who’d come from other places, marooned in the wheatbelt, biding their time, planting vegetable gardens to soak up weekends with absolutely nothing to do. The smart ones loaded their cars on Friday night and drove to town, returning in a semi-depressed state every Sunday night, deadening the rest of week with overwork and alcohol. But mostly it was just the hum of harvesters, conversations about reflux and milk teeth, the taste of microwave means and snowdrift CSI, no matter how big your antenna.

Review copy.

Say You’re Sorry by Michael Robotham

“We disappeared together, Tash and me. That was a summer of hot winds and fierce storms that came and went like, well storms do. It was on a clear night at the end of August after the Bingham Summer Festival, when the funfair rides had fallen silent and the coloured lights had been turned off.”

A few years ago I read Australian author Michael Robotham’s Suspect, the first in the Joe O’Louglin series.  In this novel, the London-based clinical psychologist, just diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, is drawn into a murder investigation and lies about his past relationship with the victim. Say You’re Sorry is the sixth novel in the series (Suspect, Lost, Shatter, Bleed for Me, & The Wreckage). Since I have a weakness for books that feature psychologists, I’d been meaning to get back to this series, but somehow, 4 of them have passed me by, so here I am with number 6. I’ve missed a bit along the way. Joe has moved back to London, and he takes medication for Parkinson’s which seems to be helping. He’s separated from his wife, Julianne, and his daughter Charlie is now a rebellious teenager. Joe works 2 days a week for the NHS and the rest of the time he works on “referrals [from] the Crown Prosecution Service.” There’s the sense that Joe’s work has become a little too routine and predictable, but all of that is about to change when Joe is pulled away from his commitments to make a psychological evaluation of a murder suspect.

The plot revolves around two crimes: the disappearance three years earlier of the two 15-year-old “Bingham girls” Piper Hadley and Tash McBain, best friends from school. Good-looking and confident Tash came from a rough home life and had a bad reputation. Fully aware of her attractiveness, she played teasing games with many of the males in her circle. Piper, who came from an upper-class background, seems an unlikely friend for Tash, and when Piper’s friendship with Tash began to lead to trouble, her parents shipped her off for to a re-education centre. But intervention from Piper’s parents inevitably backfired, and the two girls disappeared without a trace one summer night. The consensus is that the girls ran off to London.

The second crime takes during a blizzard at the remote farmhouse which used to be the home of Tash’s family. Joe is heading for a long weekend in Oxford “to talk at a mental health symposium” when he’s co-opted to provide a psychological evaluation on the suspect of a bloody double homicide. Initially the crime has the hallmarks of a classic home invasion. The husband was trying to run when his assailant bashed in his skull with a blunt object. Nasty, but the wife met a worse end. She was tied down onto the bed and set on fire. The police have a suspect–Augie Shaw, a handyman employed by the victims. The handyman has a history of mental problems and he’d recently been fired over a matter of missing underwear. The police are happy with an open and shut case, but Joe can’t fit the crime to the handyman, and then again there are some very troubling clues at the crime scene that leads Joe to think that the double homicide was linked to something else that occurred at the farmhouse.

Joe makes an interesting series character, and in this novel, former Det Insp. Vincent Ruiz (from Suspect) is back and joins Joe in his hunt for the truth. Joe finds himself investigating the cold case of the missing Bingham girls, and just as a crime scene can become contaminated as people inadvertently trammel clues, the stories about the girls have become distorted with time, and Joe has to wade through the myths built up around the two missing teenagers.

Everyone had a story about us–even the people who never liked us. We were cheeky, fun loving, popular, hard-working; we were straight A students. I laughed my ass off at that one.

People put a shine on us that wasn’t there for real, making us into the angels they wanted us to be. Our mothers were decent. Our fathers were blameless. Perfect parents who didn’t deserve to be tormented because of the posters and my collection of crystals  and my photo-booth portraits of my friends.

Narrated in turn by Piper Hadley and Joe O’Loughlin, Say You’re Sorry is the perfect distraction read, and by that I mean that you can be on a train or a plane or surrounded by annoying conversationalists, but you won’t hear them; you’ll be turning the pages of this book. On the down side (and this may seem a strange comment), I didn’t want to put this book down as by doing so, I was prolonging a crime. There’s an uncomfortable complicit feeling of reading a book while a crime is in process. I had the same feeling when I watched the film, The Cell. Almost fast forwarded the DVD for that one.

While Say You’re Sorry is a crime novel with a strong psychological bent, it’s also qualifies as a thriller towards the end. I didn’t guess the perp for this one, and the book kept me guessing to the end….

Mirrors have an interesting effect in interview rooms. People struggle to lie when they can see themselves doing it. They become more self-conscious as they try to sound more convincing and truthful

Review copy.