This story really crept up and took hold of me. It’s a slow burn, dual timeline mystery set in small town Australia. Katherine has moved to her husband James’s hometown of Lowbridge, a town with a very clear line between ‘the haves and have-nots’. Katherine is struggling with her mood and self-medicating with drink. James is hoping that the move will help her and has made it clear that they can’t continue as they are. He encourages her to get dressed and leave the house or go for a run like she used to. It’s clear something momentous has happened and their lives have imploded, but they are each dealing with it in different ways. In fact their teenage daughter Maggie was killed in a car accident, where the designated driver had been drinking. When Katherine does leave the house she accidentally stumbles across the town’s historical society and shows an interest in the exhibition they’re putting together. It’s something she can potentially help with and it’s enough to get her motivated. However, when she comes across a thirty year old mystery, problems start to arise. The disappearance of a young girl called Tess during the summer of 1987 has remained unsolved and Katherine thinks it may be time to highlight the case and perhaps jog people’s memories. She knows she must involve Tess’s family in the decision, but she doesn’t expect opposition from anyone else. It’s James’s opposition that surprises her most. He tells her to leave the mystery alone, that it will stir up trouble and it’s would be unhealthy for her to become wrapped up in another family’s grief. Katherine is determined though and with Tess’s family on board she starts to research what happened in 1987.
From the beginning, the author really gives us the sense of what it’s like to live in a small town where everyone knows each other. Having grown up in a small market town I know it’s rare for me to run errands without seeing someone I know. I still have friends that I had when I was thirteen and when I was sixteen a friend of mine was murdered, a few days before Christmas. A death like that sends a shockwave through the whole town and I could clearly imagine the collective grief and anger that Katherine would unearth as she investigates what happened. In the summer of 1987 the town was already at odds over a women’s clinic being proposed by a local doctor. This has enraged the anti-abortion lobby leading to protests and appeals to the locals authorities to stop the development. Three teenagers from the ‘right side’ of town are reaching an age where they’re asserting their independence and finishing their leaving certificates at school. Tess and Sim are friends with the slightly younger Luisa who is from an Italian family. The girls try to keep the clinic out of their conversation because it is Sim’s mother fighting to get the clinic open and Luisa parents are Roman Catholics, utterly opposed to abortion. Because they’re from the more middle class part of town they tend to keep separate from the ‘Pitsville’ kids, the area mainly inhabited by miners and their families. The author has really captured what it’s like to be a teenage girl on the cusp of womanhood. In the girl’s conversations there are all those insecurities about how they look and what they wear, their popularity and how boys view them. All three acknowledge that one girl at school really does capture the boy’s attention.
Jac is thought of as ‘easy’ by other girls, mainly because of the attention she receives from boys but also because of her sexy clothes. A lot of the derision also comes from the fact she’s a miner’s daughter from Pitsville, but they rarely think about what her life is actually like. The author takes us into her home, with a father who works and drinks heavily, often bringing other miners back to the house to continue drinking late into the night. Unbeknownst to anyone it’s on one of these nights that something terrible happens to Jac, setting in motion a sequence of events that will change her life. As Tess disappears off the face of the earth, Jac also goes missing but no one notices. I enjoyed this angle on the story very much, because it injects a element of social injustice into the mystery. We know that when girls go missing, even now, there are all sorts of social factors that play into the way the police investigate and the media report on the story. Often girls from black british and other minority communities go missing and don’t even make the evening news. Sim and Tess take Luisa to a house party after drinking a lot of home made ‘punch’. When they lose sight of their friend they go searching and find a brawl going on in an upstairs bedroom. Luisa is on the bed and two boys are fighting, each one claiming to be the knight in shining armour who’s found Luisa being attacked. It’s such a big story that everyone at school knows by Monday morning. It’s a big story because it’s Luisa. If it was a Pitsville girl would the popular kids get to know? Would they even care?
Katherine is a complicated heroine. She’s trying to avoid grief by drinking and I had a huge amount of empathy for her. Yet in a vicious argument with husband Jamie, he tells her a few home truths that made me think about it a different way. She wants him to grieve the same way she does, but he points out that he’s never been able to. It’s not that he doesn’t want to cry and shut the world out, it’s that he’s never had the luxury of falling apart. When their daughter Maggie was killed Katherine was able to keep her wonderful memories. She can imagine their daughter’s beautiful face when she thinks of her, but only because he had to see her broken and bleeding. He identified Maggie so that Katherine could keep her memories intact. He went to the inquest, so she didn’t have to hear the horrific details. She has felt alone, but so has he. I found this really powerful and I could understand why he thought involving herself in another family’s grief was unwise. Yet that’s not the full story, because Jamie has been keeping something from Katherine. That last summer when Tess disappeared, Jamie was secretly in a relationship with her. Maybe it’s in Jamie’s interest to stop Katherine from digging up the past. Could it be that he knows more than he’s letting on? The story dragged me in different ways, as each revelation came to light. I loved that the more we found out about Tess, the more special she became. It was wonderful to see her offer support and practical help to others, even to people others might have overlooked. She’s aware of the popular crowd’s opinion, but doesn’t let it sway her. She makes her own decisions and sets aside judgement. I had to have an early night to finish the book in one go, because I didn’t want to miss anything. This is a fascinating mystery, with a powerful theme running throughout about women’s rights over their lives and their own bodies.
Thank you to the Squad Pod Collective and Ultimo Press for my copy of this book.
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