JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

Cutters End by Margaret Hickey

A desert highway. A remote town. A murder that won’t stay hidden.

New Year’s Eve, 1989. Eighteen-year-old Ingrid Mathers is hitchhiking her way to Alice Springs. Bored, hungover and separated from her friend Joanne, she accepts a lift to the remote town of Cutters End.

July 2021. Detective Sergeant Mark Ariti is seconded to a recently reopened case, one in which he has a personal connection. Three decades ago, a burnt and broken body was discovered in scrub off the Stuart Highway, 300km south of Cutters End. Though ultimately ruled an accidental death, many people – including a high-profile celebrity – are convinced it was murder.

When Mark’s interviews with the witnesses in the old case files go nowhere, he has no choice but to make the long journey up the highway to Cutters End.

And with the help of local Senior Constable Jagdeep Kaur, he soon learns that this death isn’t the only unsolved case that hangs over the town…

Set in the South Australian outback, Margaret Hickey’s Cutters End transports us to rural Australia and centres around a suspicious death thirty years earlier. At the time it was ruled an accident, but what really happened along that deserted and dusty highway? Was the death of Michael Denby really an accident?

This novel falls fairly easily into the rural crime and Australian Outback noir genre, and doesn’t stray too far from the stereotypical elements of the space — the flawed male detective with a troubling marriage, a young woman holding a few too many secrets, a decades-old cold case that remains unsolved, and the desolate town filled with sketchy inhabitants. You’ll know from simply glancing at the cover whether this is novel you’ll want to read.

Cutters End is definitely a commercial novel and will find many valued readers looking for some sort of escapism. This would be a great book to gift for Father’s Day.

“She returned to her papers, indecisive. Since Mark’s visit, and perhaps just before, she sensed that her life was becoming unstuck. Her hand rested on the photograph from the old newspaper clipping. Nothing seemed definite and the resolve she’d enjoyed for a number of years was slipping.”

With all rural thrillers, setting is integral. Get that wrong and you’ve lost the atmosphere. In Cutters End, Margaret captures the thick heat and humidity of rural Australia with ease — the desolate town and its silences, the houses and businesses few and far in between, with plenty of distance and solitude to commit a crime and keep it hidden. Everyone knows each other and secrets can remain hidden for years.

In most rural thrillers, evidence is lacking so the story relies on the protagonist slowly unravelling the crime secret-by-secret, and this usually stems from townsfolk. In Cutters End, whilst some evidence reveals itself over the course of the novel, Mark’s interactions with other characters and his ability to piece together clues helps him solve the crime.

“The phone rang: his mother. Mark felt the familiar pang of guilt that she was calling him and not the other way around. His mother still lived in Booralama, the country town he grew up in. The rose gardens, the long, slow, winding river and the old gum trees — the town never failed to fill him with fault nostalgia for all things young and free.”

Told with a dual timeline, moving between the 1980s/1990s and the present allows Margaret to reflect on each era. In the past, hitchhiking was incredibly common but posed significant dangers for young women. Additionally, women who were abused or hurt were rarely believed, so it was easier for crimes to go unpunished. The present storyline follows a fairly standard kind of procedural pace, with Mark finding similarities between the events in Cutters End and the notorious Milat backpacker murders.

Admittedly, I did feel like a couple of loose threads undervalued the rest of the novel, particularly around TV presenter Suzanne Miller and her interest in the case. She’s in one scene and we barely hear from her again. I felt there was a missed opportunity to incorporate her into the story, because at present it feels like you could cull her and it’d barely make a difference. Secondly, Mark’s relationship with his wife felt thinly developed, and their storyline as a whole could’ve been explored a bit more.

“As the dark paddocks rolled on by, gradually giving way to subdivisions and then traffic, he thought about his own lack of resolve over the years. He seemed to float along; things came to him and he accepted them as par for the course.”

Pacy, intriguing and exhilarating, Cutters End is recommended for fans of rural crime, such as Jane Harper, Chris Hammer and Greg Buchanan. Readership skews 25+

Thank you to the publisher for sending me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Cutters End
Margaret Hickey
August 2021
Penguin Random House Publishers

The 22 Murders of Madison May by Max Barry

‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.’

In Queens, New York, 22-year-old real estate agent Madison May is showing a house. The buyer, a man she’s never met, is friendly, engaging . . . and claims to be her soulmate from a parallel life. She’s in danger, he tells her. He’s come to save her.

Later that day, newspaper journalist Felicity Staples is assigned to report on Madison May’s murder. Discontent with her own life, Felicity finds herself drawn into a shocking conspiracy involving a powerful group who have harnessed the ability to slip between lives – to move between one version of reality to another.

On the run, turned into an imposter in her own life, Felicity is forced to seek the truth behind Madison May, the woman who is murdered over and over, in different ways, wherever she goes. For only by saving Madison May can Felicity reassemble the broken pieces of herself.

Max Barry’s The 22 Murders of Madison May is a parallel-universe thriller about a crazed psychopath and his incessant, unexplained need to travel between different worlds to kill the same girl, over and over — Madison May.

We meet Madison in the opening chapter. She’s a young real estate agent showing a new listing to a potential buyer. Before long, he’s professing his love for her. And then he’s stabbing her to death. When reporter Felicity Staples is assigned the story, she’s suddenly thrust into an inter-dimensional saga that has her leaping through time in an effort to save Madison May.

“She sprawled on the tracks, banging her chin and elbow and knee. Her bag hit the ground and vomited forth her belongings. She raised her head quickly, because there was a train approaching, she recalled, a train, its lights blooming, and as she did, the air split with a bone-rattling blast from its horn.”

Barry’s novel is very good — so good I ripped through the story in one day. This is the very definition of a cat-and-mouse chase.

The world-building is complex enough to be interesting and draw the reader in, but not so complicated that it’s hard for readers to follow. Everything about this novel is comprehensible and easy to follow.

In each new world, Felicity’s life is very similar, with a few exceptions. Perhaps her boyfriend suddenly knows how to cook, or one of her cats doesn’t exist. Her job is the same, and her apartment as well, but her furniture might be different. And in every new world, Madison May has the same aspirations and the same friends, but her life is in a different place. She’s a real estate agent or a waitress, or perhaps she’s trying to make it as an actress.

Once we’ve moved on from one world, we never go back again, so the story is always progressing in a forward motion and there’s always something new to discover when we meet Madison May again and again and again. The poor girl just keeps getting murdered, and yet Felicity is determined to save her, even though she knows that when she moves into another world, she’ll never be able to go back to her old life. She’s moving further and further away from her own reality.

Experimenting with notions of the space-time continuum, The 22 Murders of Madison May is certainly something I could see playing out on the big screen.

“She didn’t want to give up the egg. It was practically the only thing she had: the only thing that had come with her aside from the clothes she’d been wearing. But she couldn’t hide it for much longer. Eventually, they would find it.”

There’s a small cast of characters, which allows Barry to capture each with depth and believability. Each new world is an alternate construction of Madison May, and how she intersects with Felicity, Clay and Hugo. Occasionally, secondary characters make an appearance.

I’ll admit, there didn’t seem to be as much introspection for Felicity as I would’ve expected. She doesn’t seem particularly stricken to discover she can never go back to her old life, and she seems to cast aside her job rather quickly — so quickly I forgot her job existed at all. Her character development is about embracing the life you’re given and not dwelling on what’s lost, but still, I expected a bit more reflection from her character. Psychologically, shouldn’t she be more affected by what she’s facing?

“She didn’t dare turn. But she saw his eyes shift. The hand holding the knife moved lower, hovering between the front seats like the fang of a snake. He would let the car pass, she saw. If she moved, he would stab her, but his plan was to kill her after it had gone.”

Chilling and clever, and progressing at breakneck speed, The 22 Murders of Madison May is a joy to devour. For fans of crime, thriller and mystery novels. Readership skews 20+

Thank you to the publisher for sending me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

The 22 Murders of Madison May
Max Barry
July 2021
Hachette Book Publishers

Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan

She thought of the horses, of the eyes in the earth.
She thought about that number, sixteen. That strange number . . .

Near the dying English seaside town of Ilmarsh, local police detective Alec Nichols discovers sixteen horses’ heads on a farm, each buried with a single eye facing the low winter sun. After forensic veterinarian Cooper Allen travels to the scene, the investigators soon uncover evidence of a chain of crimes in the community – disappearances, arson and mutilations – all culminating in the reveal of something deadly lurking in the ground itself.

In the dark days that follow, the town slips into panic and paranoia. Everything is not as it seems. Anyone could be a suspect. And as Cooper finds herself unable to leave town, Alec is stalked by an unseen threat. The two investigators race to uncover the truth behind these frightening and insidious mysteries – no matter the cost.

Sixteen Horses is a story of enduring guilt, trauma and punishment, set in a small seaside community the rest of the world has left behind . . .

Greg Buchanan’s debut thriller Sixteen Horses is set in a small English seaside community, and follows the discovery of 16 severed horse heads on a remote farm, partially buried. The mystery soon unravels into much more than just murdered animals, drawing the reader in with secrets and a multi-layered crime.

Everyone holds secrets in the secluded town of Ilmarsh — marriages are fraught, relationships are tested, and there’s a lot for local police detective Alec Nichols to uncover. The initial crime feels quite unique to the genre, and the story takes you on quite a journey as you work to figure out who killed the sixteen horses.

“The killer had secured the horses in the ground by digging holes, dropping the heads within these holes, caking soil around the flesh, then spreading loose dirt to help the skin blend in with the surrounding earth. The purpose was to delay them being found, but not indefinitely. To make the realisation itself a moment of power.”

Similar to other rural crime novels, the strength lies in the setting. The dry, desolate, stretched town where nothing really happens but everyone manages to possess some dark secret.

Stylistically, the book feels quite jagged — stop-and-start. Quotes are scattered throughout, as well as short brief chapters. Each passing day is clearly marked, and some chapters towards the end require a re-read to grasp masked plot — twists you missed or didn’t see coming. Greg’s writing style feels very poetic and lyrical, keeping pace on each page and maintaining intrigue. There’s a dreaded feeling of foreboding as you make your way through the story, which is the sign of a great crime novel.

The ending will satisfy readers.

“The teenage angled away from the rising sun. Her whole face convulsed, forcing a sneeze out onto the damp mossy rock beside her. In the early light, droplets dribbled down into the miscoloured marsh below. The void behind her nose ached. She was alone.”

Admittedly, I did confuse some of the secondary characters with each other. Whilst written in third person, the POV does shift between quite a few different characters and after a while they all start to merge together. Perhaps the number of perspectives could’ve been stripped back?

“The journey took a few hours, enough for the specialist to feel queasy without travel sickness pills. Trains weren’t normally too bad, and driving herself, that was fine, but the carriages heaved at slight angles along the rails. Her body, her mind — they lost their balance. The world sank into nausea.”

Evocative, intelligent and haunting, crime and thriller fans will love Sixteen Horses. For those who loved The Dry and Scrublands. The genre skews towards gothic, and readership skews 20+

Warning: extreme animal abuse.

Thank you to the publisher for sending me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Sixteen Horses
Greg Buchanan
June 2021
Pan Macmillan Book Publishers

Still by Matt Nable

Darwin, Summer, 1963.

The humidity sat heavy and thick over the town as Senior Constable Ned Potter looked down at a body that had been dragged from the shallow marshland. He didn’t need a coroner to tell him this was a bad death. He didn’t know then that this was only the first. Or that he was about to risk everything looking for answers.

Late one night, Charlotte Clark drove the long way home, thinking about how stuck she felt, a 23-year-old housewife, married to a cowboy who wasn’t who she thought he was. The days ahead felt suffocating, living in a town where she was supposed to keep herself nice and wait for her husband to get home from the pub. Charlotte stopped the car, stepped out to breathe in the night air and looked out over the water to the tangled mangroves. She never heard a sound before the hand was around her mouth.

Both Charlotte and Ned are about to learn that the world they live in is full of secrets and that it takes courage to fight for what is right. But there are people who will do anything to protect themselves and sometimes courage is not enough to keep you safe.

Set in 1963 Darwin, Matt Nable’s Still is a rural crime drama that explores corruption and violence within the police force, racism, and the murder and cover-up of a local Indigenous man.

Matt’s strength lies in the story’s setting and atmosphere — the dry, humid, sticky Northern Territory. The crocodile-infested marshlands. The temperature and the desolate landscape leap off the page, contributing to a visceral and compelling rural crime story for fans of The Dry and Scrublands.

“Ned Potter, a fishing rod resting loosely on his hip, looked north. The Timor Sear in front of him, bumpy and moving in all directions, was rebounding in torn crests off the weathered edges of the rock platform he stood on. His short sandy hair moved with the wind across the sharp part on the left side of his scalp.”

Stylistically, the novel is written in third person and switches POV between policeman Ned Potter, a law-abiding but alcohol-addicted policeman who refuses to pin a local murder on two innocent men, and the young Charlotte Clark, whose marriage to her husband is not what she was anticipating. She feels trapped in her own home, craving more than the constricting life with her flawed and cheating partner.

My favourite storyline was Charlotte Clark — her storyline and her chance encounter with a beaten man propels the story forward. Whilst Ned is an interesting character, and the corruption in the town is an interesting story to unravel, I don’t think Ned could’ve carried this novel. Charlotte expands the story and the plot, and female readers may find themselves able to relate to elements of Charlotte’s life.

“Before Charlotte turned around, she saw a gust of wind sweep over the swamp and spoil the black slate of still water. The moonlight bounced off the disturbance and she caught the glowing eyes of a crocodile just before they sank beneath the water.”

Because it’s quite clear who is responsible for the murder quite early on, and because this novel is more about uncovering police corruption, Still feels quite unique in the crime genre. We’re following these characters to find out if justice will be served — this isn’t a whodunnit kind of story. Whilst this novel won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, there is plenty with these pages to keep a reader turning.

A small flaw but I did find a lot of the dialogue very unrealistic, particularly between Ned and the other policemen, and also the Mayor. The dialogue felt quite over-the-top, caricature and not at all natural. I felt that some of the masterminds behind the corruption could’ve been a bit more clever in their conversations — a bit more intimidating and coy, choosing their words carefully. As a result, some of these secondary characters, particularly the villains, felt a little underdeveloped and like cardboard cut-outs. I think there was room for more depth there, particularly in how they communicate with others.

“Ned sat across from Senior Sergeant Riley in the waiting room outside Mayor Landry’s office. They didn’t speak. Ned didn’t even look at Riley but could feel his glare. And he could hear his tongue running across his gums, loosening the remains of what he’d just eaten.”

Descriptive and gripping, Still is recommended for fans of crime, thriller and mystery. Readership skews male, 18+

Thank you to the publisher for sending me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Still
Matt Nable
June 2021
Hachette Book Publishers

Win by Harlan Coben

From the #1 bestselling author and creator of hit Netflix series The Stranger comes a riveting new thriller, starring the new hero Windsor Horne Lockwood III – or Win, as he is known to his (few) friends…

Over twenty years ago, heiress Patricia Lockwood was abducted during a robbery of her family’s estate, then locked inside an isolated cabin for months. Patricia escaped, but so did her captors, and the items stolen from her family were never recovered.

Until now.

On New York’s Upper West Side, a recluse is found murdered in his penthouse apartment, alongside two objects of note: a stolen Vermeer painting and a leather suitcase bearing the initials WHL3. For the first time in years, the authorities have a lead not only on Patricia’s kidnapping but also on another FBI cold case – with the suitcase and painting both pointing them towards one man.

Windsor Horne Lockwood III – or Win as his few friends call him – doesn’t know how his suitcase and his family’s stolen painting ended up in this dead man’s apartment. But he’s interested – especially when the FBI tell him that the man who kidnapped his cousin was also behind an act of domestic terrorism, and that he may still be at large.

The two cases have baffled the FBI for decades. But Win has three things the FBI does not: a personal connection to the case, a large fortune, and his own unique brand of justice …

Harlan Coben’s latest thriller Win is a delectable mystery novel, bringing a long-established sidekick into the forefront and exploring two crimes spanning two decades.

Told in first person point of view, this is the first novel with the rich and unsympathetic Win as the protagonist. This is my first Harlan Coben read and from browsing reviews I can see that Win appears in countless other Harlan novels, but more in a supporting role capacity. Fans seem thrilled that Harlan has decided to redirect focus to Win in this new novel.

“We share a name — Windsor Horne Lockwood. He’s the second, I’m the third. He is called Windsor. I, like my beloved grandfather, am Win. I have no son, just a biological daughter, so unless I, to quote my father, ‘up my game,’ the Windsor Horne Lockwood name will end at three. I don’t really see this as any great tragedy.”

With more than one crime to solve, Win is an almost 400-page game of cat-and-mouse. When a reclusive man is found dead in his penthouse apartment, surrounded by two items stolen from Win’s family, there’s a chance this man’s death could unveil the truth behind Win’s cousin Patricia and her kidnapping decades earlier.

Harlan’s strengths lie in his plotting and pacing — he builds tension with every chapter, revealing just enough information to keep you hooked. His writing is tight, and the dialogue, whilst clipped and stunted at times, keeps the story moving at a continued heightened pace.

“The image freezes. I squint and lean closer. I still can’t pick up much, but this much seems clear: Both knew that they were on a security camera and at this point — the point where I’ve asked the image to be frozen — the man we now know is Ry Strauss looks up into the lens.”

Admittedly, Win isn’t a very likeable character, and without being familiar with him, I feel like his personality is a detriment. With how unsympathetic and arrogant he is, he feels inaccessible to a reader, like we care more about the secondary characters and their journey than we do about him.

Win is quite the complex, convoluted read. There are a lot of elements to Win’s debut story — his attack on Teddy Lyons and the fallout, his father’s secrets, his Uncle’s murder, his cousin’s kidnapping, the missing family items, the Jane Street Six, and the dead recluse in a fancy apartment. Did we need everything? Could the plot have been stripped of just one element, so that it wasn’t so easy to get confused about which characters were which? Which mystery belonged to which character? Perhaps.

“The two leaders were household names. In most famous photographs, people search for some kind of extra meaning in the placement of subjects, almost as you would, to stay on subject, with a great painting. You could see that all here.”

Fast-paced and absorbing, Win is recommended for fans of crime, thriller and mystery.

Thank you to the publisher for mailing me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Win
Harlan Coben
March 2021
Penguin Random House Publishers