Thursday Temptations

Ashley Kalagian Blunt continues her exploration of the perils of malicious online communities in Like, Follow, Die.

Readers of Blunt’s debut crime fiction Dark Mode will remember how that novel addressed the obsession of stalkers in a pre- and post-internet world. The manipulation of that main character, Reagan Carsen, was visceral, despite her attempts to keep a very low profile: no social media, no photos, no online ‘profiles’ anywhere. Yet she was subjected to a targeted campaign of terror by one depraved individual. Close readers of that novel may recall a reference at the end of it to a website called ‘A New Place for Men’, and this is where Blunt takes the story in Like, Follow, Die.

The timeline is a combination of present-day characters and events and pages of notes, headed ‘NSW Police Evidence’, from a past case. In the early stages you’ll need to be paying attention, as a lot of information about a number of people is provided very rapidly on a variety of timelines, which become more obvious as the plot reveals itself.

The first character we meet is Corinne Gray. A downtrodden woman living in poverty, we first meet her on a rainy morning in March 2025 when homicide detective Kyle Nazarian knocks on her door.

When the knock came, Corinne Gray wasn’t expecting the cops. She wasn’t expecting anyone.

Kyle Nazarian wasn’t expecting to be knocking on her door, either. Recently returned to Sydney from a rural posting, he was only made a probationary detective in the homicide squad the month before.

Detective Kyle Nazarian dashed through the rain, up the driveway and towards the forensics tent erected at the entrance of 68a Seabeach Avenue, Mona Vale. Anticipation prickled through him.

After five years of being held back, this was it.

However, while Corinne was not expecting him, she knows why Kyle is knocking on her door. He wants to talk about her son, Ben. Everybody wants to talk about him, even though it will be quite a while before the reader finds out why.

NSW Police evidence #JH-17-9

Handwritten journal belonging to Benjamin Gray, aged 12

13 February 2016

Dear Dad, Writing to you was Mum’s idea. It feels a bit weird, since we’ve never met. But Mum said that’s okay, I can introduce myself and tell you whatever I want.

The storyline deploys these three main voices – Corinne, Kyle and Ben – in a series of interspersed chapters that cleverly reveal the reasons why Corinne and Kyle are meeting, why the police have Ben’s handwritten journal as evidence, and what happened to him. It all comes down to a series of desperate stories and the manipulation of others that culminate in Corinne and Kyle’s discussion on that rainy afternoon. A discussion Corinne sees as her chance to finally set the story straight.

A single mother who struggled to raise her much-wanted son, her relationship with Ben became increasingly fraught. Financial troubles had forced them from their reasonably comfortable life, and Ben from his exclusive boys’ school, to less salubrious accommodation and a public school. Having to part with his beloved pet dog Cheddar, and finding it difficult to fit in with his peers, poverty does not sit well with Ben. When Corinne spirals into depression after she loses her job, it seems that things cannot get much worse for these two. As Ben hits puberty, he becomes even more antagonistic towards his mother. Then he meets a girl, Chelsea, and that relationship rapidly becomes equally fraught. There’s also something else building there – a tendency towards misogyny, fostered, it seems, by an online community he’s become very involved in – ‘A New Place for Men’.

I read the first volume of Y: The Last Man. Except for the main guy, all the characters are women, which makes it pretty dull.

As his contempt for his mother grows, and his relationship with Chelsea gets more erratic, there are a few hints of normality. Corinne finally finds a meaningful relationship of her own, which Ben’s hot and cold on, as he seems to be with everything.

Mum finally told me about the guy she’s been seeing, as if I didn’t know.

She used to bang on about how we should eat dinner together like a ‘family’, but now she’s at this guy’s place all the time. His name is Gavin.

There is a reason why Kyle knocked on Corinne’s door that morning, despite his wife really needing him at home – her at-risk pregnancy is getting more and more complicated with every passing day, with only limited support from extended family. Operationally, he was not authorised to be there; his probationary status has been suspended, and he is in trouble for something he did as part of a double homicide investigation he’s involved in.

However, the detective he’d been assigned to work with, Duff, is a legend – one of those old-fashioned, kick-doors-and-heads-in-if-necessary investigators who’s back working after an illness that is still threatening to take away the job he loves.

Duff was in his sixties, a heavy-boned man with the face of one of those disgruntled owls. He was part of a homicide investigation team that worked out of headquarters, the team Kyle was now officially part of.

He’s a respected mentor for Kyle if you ignore the dodgy evidence handling and the leaping to conclusions that’s going on in the dual investigations of the death of Scott Chambers, a seemingly normal family man shot dead in his own bathroom when his wife and daughters were staying with her parents, and of a more notorious man, Nestor Vernon, someone the team had been looking for, who was shot in a similar manner inside his locked apartment.

‘Uniforms entered with the building manager and found the owner deceased. Single gunshot wound to the forehead, same as Chambers.‘

The investigation of those deaths is what sent Kyle to Corinne’s door. He’d found evidence of a connection between these two seemingly unconnected men, and then worked backwards to Benjamin Gray. Kyle’s there to scratch an itch, and Corinne sees this as an opportunity to finally get a fair hearing for her son – and for herself as a parent.

She’d never said this part out loud though. ‘You know there are cultures where, if someone goes astray, it’s not considered an individual failing. The community looks at themselves and asks “How did we fail? What could we have done to prevent this?” You’d never see that here …’.

The conclusion to the story is red hot and explosive, but the underlying message here – that the worst people are using the anonymity, immediacy and voice the internet provides as a vehicle for growing hatred – is stone cold and chilling.