Bay of Fires (Poppy Gee, Hachette)

Murdered girls washed up on picture-postcard Tassie beaches. You could joke about not telling Tourism Tasmania, but sadly this novel takes some of its inspiration from real events, specifically, the murder of Italian tourist Victoria Cafasso and the disappearance of German tourist Nancy Grunwaldt in the early 1990s. Both cases remain unsolved. In her debut novel, Poppy Gee writes about an idyllic holiday spot in remote coastal Tasmania, where no more than a dozen shacks line a lagoon and secrets are hard to keep. That our protagonist Sarah Avery has returned, having left her boyfriend and her job, is cause for gossip in itself. When the bikini-clad body of a young girl is found washed up on the beach just a year after another teenage girl went missing, journalist Hall Flynn is sent to investigate, and all too quickly the close-knit community turns on itself. I have a few reservations with Gee’s writing style, as at times I found her depiction of Sarah’s unlikeability a bit overdone. The grim undercurrent to descriptions of the locals and the landscape also felt a bit laboured, though I do appreciate that Gee is providing us with a clearer view of paradise: not everyone is happy, not everyone behaves well and all beautiful seaside communities have a rubbish dump. Nonetheless, this novel has stuck in my mind, and I will be recommending it as a compelling, dark summer read for fans of thought-provoking dramas. (Read the interview here.)

Catherine Schulz is an indie bookseller at Fullers Bookshop in Hobart

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

Category: Reviews