Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Posts Tagged ‘Australia’

On the surface, the Keddies and the Gilpins don’t have much in common except that both families live in Australia.  The Keddies are a well-to-do Melbourne family–a husband, a wife, a daughter; the Gilpins are a down-at-the-heels family on Belport Island–a husband, a wife, a daughter, a son.  So why does one of the women remain a wife while the other becomes a widow?

Kate and Mia Keddie are at the Melbourne Airport, eager to see John Keddie when he returns from his two-week business trip to London.  But even after the last passengers leave the plane, John doesn’t appear.  Finally, Kate calls her husband’s office to find out if some last-minute emergency has kept him in England.

The first person she speaks to quickly transfers her call to John’s boss, who answers Kate’s first couple of inquiries with curt responses.  Trying to hold on to her temper, Kate explains that she and her daughter are waiting for John.  “If John attended the research colloquium this year,” his supervisor tells Kate, “we wouldn’t know about it….John hasn’t worked here for three months.”

The local police don’t seem to take John’s disappearance seriously, saying that he’ll probably be home in a day or two.  But Kate isn’t so sure.  This is so unlike him, she thinks.  Then, in the middle of the night, her cell phone rings.  It’s the Belport Island police, asking her if she’s at her vacation home on the island.  “No, I’m not,” she answers him.  “Well, someone is,” the officer responds.

Abby Gilpin, meanwhile, has a different concern.  One of her husband’s customers tells her that Ray never came to her house yesterday, as expected, for a landscaping job; when Abby asks her husband why he didn’t go, he tells her he did and that the client is losing her memory.  One of them is lying, but which one?  And why were a pair of Ray’s brand-new boots tossed in the trash, along with his cargo pants and a work shirt with his company’s logo, Island Care, printed on it?

The only connection between the two families is Belport Island.  The Gilpins have always lived there, and the Kiddies have a vacation home there.  But Katie tells the police officer investigating her husband’s disappearance that John always hated the island, and the only reason they have a house there is because his parents gave it to them as a wedding present.  So, assuming that’s where he went, why was he there?  And, if he had been there, why didn’t he tell his wife about it?

Christian White has written another spellbinding thriller, following his debut mystery The Nowhere Child, which I reviewed in February 2019.  You will be kept guessing until the very last page of The Wife and The Widow.

You can read more about Christian White at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

It’s a never-ending drought, sucking the life out of the land and the people of Australia, that is described in Jane Harper’s debut novel.  Farmers are on edge, looking at their once-profitable ranches that now are barren of crops and animal feed.  Tempers are at the breaking point, waiting for the smallest event to set them off.  And when that event comes, it’s catastrophic–the murder of three family members in the town of Kiewarra.

A delivery man finds the mother first, shot dead at the entrance of her farmhouse, and calls the police.  When Sergeant Raco arrives, he hears a cry.  Following the sound to a small bedroom, he sees a toddler in her crib, and he’s thankful that she’s unhurt.  But then he looks across the hall to another bedroom and sees the dead body of a young boy, apparently the older brother in the family.

A search is started for Luke Hadler, the husband and father of the victims.  The police don’t know whether he’s the killer or another victim, but in short order they find Luke in the back of his truck, his head nearly completely destroyed by a shotgun.  At first glance it looks open-and-shut:  a father goes crazy, kills his family.  But, says Raco, there are a couple of things that don’t seem to fit.  First, Luke didn’t kill his entire family and then himself; he let his baby daughter live, which apparently is unusual when a family member goes on a killing spree.  Second, although the shotgun used in the two murders and the suicide belonged to Luke, they were filled with Remington bullets, and the only cartridges on the Hadlers’ property were Winchesters.

It’s been over twenty years since Aaron Falk, now a federal police officer, left Kiewarra, hoping and planning never to return.  But a cryptic note from Luke’s father, “Luke lied.  You lied,” brings him back to relive the events of the past.  Is the death that occurred when Aaron and Luke were teenagers the reason for the current murders?  If so, why would someone wait all this time?  If not, what is the motive for these deaths?

Aaron’s field is investigating financial fraud, not murders.  He tells this to Luke’s father, but the man doesn’t care.  Gerry Hadler doesn’t think the police are looking deeply enough into the murders, and his hold on Aaron is strong enough that Aaron promises to stay for a week to investigate.  And that decision brings the townspeople’s never-forgotten hatred of their former neighbor out in full force, pulling to the surface the suspicions about the death of Aaron’s girlfriend two decades earlier.

The Dry is the tense, suspenseful story of a small town that has never recovered from the death of one of its teenagers more than two decades ago.  Ellie Deacon was Aaron’s off-again, on-again girlfriend, and her death by drowning could never be proved as either an accident or a suicide.  Even though Aaron was never charged with any crime, the hostility of the other townspeople forced him and his father to move to Melbourne.  And there Aaron would have gladly stayed for the remainder of his life had he not received that note from Luke’s father.

You can read more about Jane Harper at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.