Honeymoon killer
Complications arising from sunken treasure make for a daft but enjoyable romp.
Mark and Erin are young professionals, happy, successful and about to be married. But something about wheelerdealer Mark is a bit off, even sinister. Erin marries him anyway and they honeymoon in Bora Bora where, while scuba diving, they discover a submerged small plane. There are bodies inside. No plane accident has been reported and nobody has reported the loss of a bag containing millions of dollars and a swag of diamonds. The couple find the bag. Of course, they report their find and then go home and live semi-happily ever after. Of course, they don’t. They take the bag and everything, predictably, gets very complicated and frightening. There are more shady characters than there are fishy things in the water, and SOMETHING IN THE WATER, by one-time Downton Abbey actress Catherine Steadman (Simon & Schuster $35), gets very tangled indeed. Sometimes it does so successfully but the entire premise is pretty daft. Enjoy it as a mad romp.
In SHAME ON YOU, by Amy Heydenrych (Allen & Unwin, $32.99), Holly, young,
beautiful, blonde, has achieved fame and fortune by becoming a superstar of the clean-eating, clean-living social-media world. She claims to have cured her cancer by following a vegan, raw-food, teetotal diet. Her fans are gullible; they adore her.
Some are cancer sufferers who follow her advice as though she is a guru. She meets a handsome surgeon, Tyler. They go out for dinner and, later, he slashes her pretty face with his scalpel. He knows who she is and tells her she is a “f---ing fraud”. He begins stalking her.
Except for the added horror of the slashing surgeon, Holly’s story is familiar to anyone who knows of Belle Gibson, the Australian cancer-surviving clean-living guru of socialmedia fame who turned out to be a fraud – she had never had cancer.
RETRIBUTION, by Richard Anderson (Scribe, $38), is a lovely elegiac book about a horse and an unlikely love affair between a couple of lonely misfits. The prose is quintessentially Australian, as tough as an old workhorse yet as tender in its subject matter as a newborn foal. Retribution is both the name of the horse, a beautiful thoroughbred, and the theme of a tale about how, just occasionally, the losers win.
Graeme Sweetapple is a horse lover and cattle rustler. He meets Carson, a young woman as lost and lonely as he is. Into this odd pairing comes Luke, who says he is an environmental campaigner. They end up together in a dusty, dreary small town, united by their desire – for very different reasons – to gain revenge on Bob Statham. He is rich and crooked and owns Sweetapple’s family’s land, picked up for a song when the family went bust.
Statham appears to have left his wife, Caroline, a politician turfed out of her seat by the locals, who hate her. She and Sweetapple become friends. It is the revelation of the relationships, shifting, shrinking, growing incrementally, that gives the novel its edgy centre. There is a triumph of an ending and the book is a triumph of the very best kind of gritty Aussie writing.