Australia

Melanie Joosten won the Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist Award in 2011 for her first novel Berlin Syndrome which has recently been made into a film. Her second novel, Gravity Well is the story of two women wrapped around a tragedy that has impacted on both of their lives.

Lotte, an astronomer is planning to come home from Chile after five years working at a mountaintop observatory. She has been searching the skies for exoplanets, Earth-like planets orbiting distant stars but, for reasons that only later become clear, is now coming home to Australia. Nine months later, Eve is running away from her life. Hastily equipped with a tent and basic supplies she pitches up at a quiet caravan park on the southern coast of Victoria where she immerses herself in her grief. Something tragic has happened to Eve, but the details of that tragedy unfold only slowly as Eve herself comes to terms with her life.

Spinning backwards from these events is the long and rich history between Lotte and Eve. Lotte, the daughter of a woman who instilled in her a love of the stars but died from a cancer that she herself may have inherited. And Eve, her flatmate at university dealing with her own personal issues including, later, with a relationship with an older man and post-natal depression. Joosten describes their rich lives, with the dark clouds of that on-coming tragedy driving the narrative forward.

Lotte and her mother’s love of the stars and of astronomy finds its way into much of the imagery of the book with passages verging on the poetic. This about the images from the Hubble Telescope:

“The result of the Hubble’s persistent staring – the Deep Field – was spectacular. A spill of lollies across a black tablecloth, a slice of fairy bread; the pattern printed on a child’s pyjamas; a field of windflowers in full bloom. It was indescribable. Thousands of galaxies gambolled across the image, whirling dervishes of colour and heat.”

While the metaphors are sometimes obvious they never feel forced, adding instead a richness particularly to Lotte’s chapters.

“She remembers her mother once describing the complications of a family like the solar system: each person a planet, keeping their moons spinning close and influencing the paths of their companions.”

But there is always that tragedy coming, peppered with a few additional narrative surprises. Given Eve’s very obvious pain and plenty of foreshadowing of the tragedy there is an inevitability to events, a narrative gravity well of its own. A very short second person prologue comes back to bite as events unfold.  But this does not prevent the Joosten’s description of those events and their aftermath being incredibly affecting.

This is a beautifully written, truthfully observed and engaging novel about families, friendship, love and loss. In Gravity Well, Joosten has delivered a novel that is both personal and powerful. As a second novel, this continues to confirm the Best Young Novelist title and marks Joosten out as another Australian author to watch.

Sarah Bailey’s debut Australian crime novel The Dark Lake opens strongly. The body of a popular teacher is found by an early morning jogger in the town lake, surrounded by long stemmed red roses. The teacher is Rosalind Ryan, daughter of wealthy family of developers, who left town but had returned a couple of years before under cloud. Detective Emma Woodstock is called to the scene. She comes across very quickly as on edge and conflicted both about the case and her life.  Emma went to school with the victim and knows her better than the casual acquaintance than she makes it sound, although the full details of their connection do not emerge until much later.

The Dark Lake falls into the crime sub-genre of police procedural run by a too-invested, damaged cop. Emma Woodstock is a fairly unlikeable but not uninteresting protagonist. Woodstock has lived in the small town of Smithson all her life and has a young child but is also having an affair with her work partner Felix, who himself has a wife and three daughters. So from the start she is juggling a complicated personal life with potential unearthing of deeper secrets and trauma from her past. As is the norm in this sub-genre, Woodstock does not reveal her potential connection to the victim and even when she receives a threatening package potentially from the killer she does not tell her superiors, worried she will be (rightly) taken off the case.

That said, this is also a meticulous procedural with a good feel for the investigative process and politics behind it. Bailey follows Woodstock and her team through the investigation, unearthing a number of suspects and plenty of mystery.  And the team come across as competent even when stumped by the number of strands in this case.

A key in the procedural genre is the maintenance of interest or tension through the ups and downs of an investigation. It is one of the reasons why these novels tend to be on the shorter side. Unfortunately, Bailey spins the whole investigation out for too long so that from about half way point it starts to run out of puff. She does manage to keep some tension with additional personal jeopardy for Woodstock and the slow reveal of her personal history with the victim but by that time interest is starting to wane. The pacing is not helped by the inclusion of random, third person point of view chapters from minor characters which add little to the overall plot and who disappear as quickly as they are introduced.

The Dark Lake is set in the fictional regional town of Smithson is four hours from Sydney and home to a giant canning factory which is the big employer in town. This is a place where many of the locals have deep roots and everyone knows everyone else. But it is difficult to get a real sense of the place. The narrative itself never strays from the urban, focussing on the local school close to the lake, where both the Emma and Rosalind were students. There is little consequence of the novel being set in this town and it could easily have been set in an outer suburb of any Australian suburban centre.

All that said, Sarah Bailey has delivered a solid debut. She creates an engaging and well plotted mystery with plenty of suspects and red herrings. While the setting comes across as a little generic, it is refreshing to see Australian crime authors set their action in Australia and avoiding the need to Americanise.  Bailey is part of a vanguard of new, female Australian crime authors, and a signal that the Australian crime scene continues to flourish.

Alan Carter is the author of the Ned Kelly Award winning Cato Kwong series (PRIME CUT won the Best First Award in 2011), but MARLBOROUGH MAN features a new character - UK born, New Zealand based cop Nick Chester and his family.

Chester's had an "interesting" working life - starting out as an undercover cop in the UK, ending up a country cop in Havelock in rural New Zealand as part of a witness relocation scheme when his undercover work goes decidedly pear-shaped. Even with what would seem to be the impossible task of tracking him, his wife and their young son Paulie down, he's constantly on edge - anybody new could very well have been sent to exact revenge.

You'd also think that the move to rural New Zealand would mean that policing would be limited to the odd drunken skirmish, a lot of traffic tickets, and a bit of low level thieving (it does seem that the local villains are particularly obsessed with meat in various forms). Unfortunately there's been a spate of horrific child murders in these parts and the discovery of a young boy's body close by gives the neighbourhood an internal shaking echoing the constant threat of earthquakes.

There's quite a lot of set up in this novel, working the back-story of Nick's undercover exploits, and the resulting outcomes, into the current day activities. Nick's a great character, but all of the characters in this book are fabulous - especially his cop offsider Latifa Rapata; his two guardian pig-shooters Gary and Steve; Denzel the Maori kid not beyond redemption; Charlie the chicken and alpaca farmer and particularly his wife Vanessa. Each of these characters slots into the action perfectly, seamlessly contributing enough to both the good and bad of a complex story like this.

As the big wigs from the city come to take over the child murder investigation, there's less and less chance of Nick letting go, and as his old life starts to catch up with him, he determined to sort out everything and everybody in his neighbourhood. Including the local logging magnate with whom he openly shares a mutual vendetta. There's lots of strings to the bows in MARLBOROUGH MAN and just when you think they are all going to twang around Chester's neck, somehow he manages to find the right targets, granted at great risk to everything that he values most highly.

There's nary a hitch in MARLBOROUGH MAN. The characters work, the plot is cleverly executed and the sense of place is visceral. There's touches of humour and self-inflicted jeopardy which are perfectly justifiable. There's also personal loss, sadness and guilt. All in all it's so good this reviewer even managed to recover from the death of an alpaca and a pet pig which got a bit too close to home for comfort. Shows what a seriously good writer like Alan Carter can do in an absolute stand out book like MARLBOROUGH MAN.

Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins have a lot to answer for. While The Girl in Kellers Way is an effective, sometimes creepy domestic thriller there are no girls in it (except for little Alice who is not a main player). The two main characters are women, and the body found in Kellers Way is also a woman. The word “Girl” in the title is the tool used to give bookshop browsers an idea that this is a domestic noir. Australian author Megan Goldin’s debut does tick off on some of the aspects of the domestic noir sub-genre indicated by the title: strained domestic relationship, creepy controlling male character and an unreliable narrator. And she does so in a way that brings something new and a little chilling to the genre.

The narrative of The Girl in Kellers Way flicks between Julie and Mel, two very different women. Julie is the second wife of charismatic psychology lecturer Matt, bringing up Alice, the daughter by his first marriage. That first marriage ended in a tragedy that is widely known in the small American university town in which they live. Julie, still jealous of the dead Laura, has been on some cocktail of drugs since a miscarriage and finds that she cannot trust the things she sees or experiences. Every time she tries to come down off the drugs and experience the world more clearly, Matt is there to keep the dosages up.

Mel is a cop, new to a town that she moved to after the death of her husband, also a policeman, in the line of duty. She is brought into the orbit of Matt and Julie when a body found in Kellers Way turns out to be that of Matt’s first wife, previously thought to have been killed by a notorious serial killer.

The early parts of the book are tough going. Julie is a strange character to get to know, and the effect of the drugs that she is taking makes her observations clearly suspect from the start. Mel, on the other hand, is a by the numbers crime genre cop with family issues and spends the first couple of her POV chapters establishing her bona fides for the reader. Mel’s solidity provides an anchor, though, as opposed to the twisting realities of Julie’s perceptions. Once the preliminaries are out of the way, Goldin settles in for a cleverly plotted thriller with a seriously creepy idea at its core, full of great final sentence cliff hangers/reveals and hints as she switches between her two main characters.

Goldin delivers her debut in an engaging style. She effectively ramps up the tension in such a way that even when secrets are revealed, readers are left guessing how the drama is going to play out. And while there are plot and tonal echoes of SJ Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep and Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train, it is not bad company to be in. Particularly as Goldin has managed to deliver a wholly original spin on domestic noir.