Small-town secrets
Allusions to a famous real-life cold case add to the mystery in this rural Aussie thriller.
Publicity for the Sydney singer-writer’s second novel keeps proclaiming the word “heartbreaking”. My ventricles hardened instantly.
Holly Throsby’s debut Goodwood picked up on the Austen dictum that “three or four families in a country village are the very thing to work on” – especially if they provide mysterious deaths, bubbling lust and grubby secrets. This time, she turns the trope into a tale set just down the road from her first rural town south of Sydney.
It’s a quarter of a century ago. Benny Miller’s enigmatic mum, Vivian, has died – enigmatically. So, she heads back home to Cedar Valley from her studies in Sydney to find out more from Mum’s pal, Odette, who has a “conspiratorial smile”.
Benny arrives on the same day that a very anonymous, singularly dressed stranger turns up dead in front of the antique shop. And here Throsby picks up on the true-life 1948 “Somerton Man”, a chap in collar and tie found dead on an Adelaide beach, with a page from the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in his pocket.
Okay, it’s easy to nudge and wink at the multitudinous concealments and revelations in this sprightly, sometimes chintzy, occasionally perceptive fiction. It’s tempting to lift eyebrows at a small Aussie town of the 1990s with a “modest pale-green cottage”, by “neat, grassy footpaths lined with flowering trees”, and a police station lifted straight from an English village.
But it appeals and engages. Significant it ain’t. Diverting and cosy and ventricle-softening it is.