THE HOUSEMATE

Sarah Bailey

ALLEN &UNWIN, RRP $33

I didn’t want to put this book down but, then again, I didn’t want to rush through it and miss anything. In her fourth book, Sarah Bailey, leaves behind her successful series featuring police detective Gemma Woodstock (only temporarily, we hope), but takes along the plot, suspense and characterisation the author is known for. Her new protagonist, the wonderfully named Olive Groves, is an ambitious and tenacious journalist working the crime beat on a Melbourne daily who was one of the first to arrive at a murder scene in St Kilda in 2005. Ten years later, Groves is trying to come to terms with new technology and evidence that the 10-year-old murder may not be the closed case everyone has assumed. It is more than brave of a Bailey to create a new central character after the success of the Woodstock series, but she has brought to life a character readers will want to follow.

BARRY REYNOLDS VERDICT: Killer characters