Something good happens
Nikki Crutchley’s self-published Nothing Bad Happens
Here was a finalist in the Ngaio Marsh Best First Novel category this year and although it didn’t win, the compelling thriller — set in a small Coromandel town that harbours dark secrets — marked her out as a writer to watch.
No One Can Hear You again uses a fictional small-town setting (Crawton, based apparently on Cambridge, where Crutchley lives, and Taupo). It’s a place main protagonist Zoe Haywood left after high school and is only returning to on account of her estranged mother’s (apparent) suicide.
The journey will also teach Zoe more about her mother and the reasons for her coldness towards her, a distance that has impacted on every facet of Zoe’s life. When the funeral director asks her what sort of songs or readings her mother would like at her service, Zoe has no idea.
The intervening years haven’t been kind to her. She left home early, did the obligatory OE and ended up a token female teacher at an Auckland boys’ school, which she left in fraught circumstances. But she soon finds purpose in her hometown investigating the strange disappearance of a slew of teenage girls after discovering some revealing notes of her mother’s.
Helping her is an old school friend, who has had a narrow escape herself from Crawton’s darker side, and returns from Auckland with revenge on her mind. Small town gothic isn’t new of course; Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s Hawera springs to mind. While Crutchley makes good use of the small town setting, this is a novel with a Jack Reacherlike mission for good at its heart and clearly indebted to his creator, Lee Childs.
If the plot’s a little more predictable this time around, the writing has power — especially the passages concerning the captive girls — and the final third will have readers racing through the pages.