Author: Alex Doenau

The Australian crime boom continues apace, but not everyone is happy to keep their crime restricted to regional Australia or the big cities. Some, like Dervla McTiernan or Adrian McKinty, expats who found themselves on the island’s shores, became hooked on writing about their Irish homeland before branching out to America with mixed success.

Laura McCluskey has done something slightly different: she’s Melbourne (or Naarm) based and presumably Australian born, but she has Scottish grandparents. The Wolf Tree, her debut novel, is set on a remote island off the Scottish coast. It bears the lack of specificity that you can get away with from such a setting, and it promises the sort of insularity you get when everyone knows everyone else and there’s only one way off … or two, if you count the reason the police are there in the first place.

Months after sustaining a catastrophic injury on the job, George Lennox is trying to get back into police business. She and her partner, Richie Stewart, are eased back into it by investigating the seemingly open and shut suicide of an eighteen year old on the island of Eilean Eadar. The locals, under the thumb of the priest Father Ross, are not keen to talk, and while George battles her own demons she starts to almost believe the island is haunted by wolves. If George can last five days on the island and rule the death a suicide, perhaps she can make it out alive.

Crime novels often come down to the strength of their lead characters, and George Lennox is not the most sympathetic person. Eilean Eadar is the sort of place that has its own authority, which means that you have to come at it from a soft power angle; unsurprisingly, George has none of that to offer. She is a blunt instrument that isn’t even tempered with a preternatural talent for policing, with a primary talent for baseline rudeness.

The strongest element of George comes from without, in the form of her foil. Richie’s levelheaded veteran officer who does a special line in not being mad, but disappointed, doesn’t break any new ground, but he’s a nice contrast whose solidity helps to make The Wolf Tree not entirely by the numbers.

Partially inspired by the Flannan Isles Lighthouse mystery of 1900, the wisest choice in the construction of this book is that it sticks to a single timeline. Not for these readers alternating chapters 125 years apart, but rather flavour and texture that give a homeopathic tinge of history to the proceedings. It only sort of ties in to the book as a whole — one character keeps asking George “have you read the lighthouse keepers’ logs yet?” — but it informs it never the less.

Eilean Eidar is a more interesting locale than McCluskey strictly gives it credit for, and George’s bluntness acts as a smokescreen for their insularity. McCluskey briefly touches on the idea that children can be sinister, but doesn’t take it very far. She is more interested in the concept that people who reject the other have in fact othered themselves; this late revelation that George possesses an empathy that many of the citizens of Eilean Eadar are incapable of are really what seals the fate of the book, and prevents it from the delicate tipping point of policing as an act of colonisation.

Obviously it was never going to be a clearcut case of suicide (it is only on the odd occasion that you get the double blind of an open and shut case actually being open and shut despite the investigators’ attempts to convolute it), but quite how far McCluskey chooses to take it is something to boggle at.

There has to be a degree of suspension of disbelief at play here, because the outcome will have you wondering how the police could ever hope to prosecute any of it. Even if you’re not in law enforcement, you’d be glad this case isn’t yours.

The Wolf Tree is a confident, if semi-anonymous, debut novel. George Lennox is interchangeable with many other tortured detectives, with the added bonus of a mentor that she intermittently chooses to listen to. Despite the scale of the conclusion, the book isn’t neat. It is unclear whether George can return — although it would be pretty funny if she got assigned a new beat investigating murders on a series of lonely islands — but if she does, there’s enough here to bring readers back.

The Wolf Tree released in the US on February 11, 2025, and is set for release in Australia on February 28, 2025.

An ARC of The Wolf Tree was provided by HarperCollins Publishers Australia in exchange for review.

Time of the Child is a book that will go down in personal legend as one that all of the stops had to be pulled out for to get it over the line. Is it nearly as accessible as This is Happiness, a book about the simple pleasures of life and the lengths that one might go to to prolong them? It most emphatically is not. Does the promise of a far off hope help to offset the drear and dread that the predicaments of the Troy family engender? Not overly.

Yet in the final analysis Time of the Child is a warm piece of fiction about a village that operates its own way even within the strictures of the heavily Catholic Irish society of 1962. It just takes a bit to get there.

Doctor Jack Troy has kept himself apart from the town of Faha all of his life, despite being raised there. He worries, too, that he has kept his daughter Ronnie from living her own life, and that he has rendered her unlovable. These issues come to a head on the day of the Christmas fair, when a baby left at the church is delivered unto the Troys’ surgery and residence. As Doctor Troy tries to protect the child, he has to reconsider everything that he knows about his relation to the town and his perception of his daughter.

Time of the Child has been promoted as both a companion to This is Happiness and an introduction to Faha all by itself, but the reader would be hard pressed to say that this book is quite so immediately accessible, spending most of its first third on a single morning with a man that you would know the basic shape of if you had read the previous instalment, referring to things that nag at you, that you think you should know.

So if you’ve somehow got yourself a copy of the premier book of the festive season just passed (maybe you were gifted it for Christmas, and haven’t got around to it yet?), I would advise putting it down and finding out what happened in Faha before the Electric came.

By the time the titular Child shows up, the shape of the novel has changed. As she shakes up the Troy family, so too does she alter the form of the piece. There are so many ways that it could go, and Williams spends a decent time tottering on the precipice of disaster and creating another, far darker, novel. What seemed like idle thoughts before the Child suddenly become manic fantasies pursued with an unhealthy zeal, and the ends needed to achieve them are dubious at best. 

Williams elides much of the horror of what would become a child born out of wedlock in the era in a way that Clare Keegan, for example, did not. Regardless, it is clear that the Child would not thrive if surrendered to the Department. Ultimately Time of the Child is not interested in worst case scenarios beyond the acknowledgment that they are real and perilous, and it opens its heart to a world of possibility, however unlikely it may be.

Unlike This is Happiness, there is not a defined narrator. We already know the fates of some of these residents from what Noel Crowe told us on the last visit, and this time Williams’ omniscience is as miserly as he is generous. He knows the future, and tells some of it, but other important factors he leaves up to the reader. This is one of the quiet joys, the mixed ambiguity of a future only half-written. 

Time of the Child is a cumulative affair, with less of a carnival feeling than the previous trip to Faha and more of a quiet contemplation. There are many worries along the way, an almost leaden gloom, but it all adds up to a final sequence that at last feels like a proper celebration of Faha, an explanation of why we’d want to spend our time among its lives in the darkest and coldest months of the year. Perhaps that is happiness.

I don’t think we’re allowed to call Molly the Maid “autistic”, or “neurodivergent” or even “autistic coded” – she’s just another in a long line of protagonists with undiagnosed brain chemistry, something that became excessively popular when a certain sitcom that shall remain nameless inexplicably took over the world.

But I can call The Mistletoe Mystery cruel. Which it is. After the strong showing of The Maid, Nita Prose has treated her heroine as a plaything to be batted around, written as if by a child. Nobody dies, so the mystery is in Molly’s head, and every reader can see what the solution is before she even begins to get suspicious.

In the lead up to Christmas, the dearly departed Gran’s favourite time of year, Molly becomes increasingly suspicious of Juan, who is uncharacteristically keeping a secret from her, is running around at all hours, and asks her questions about her stance on diamond rings.

Of course Molly takes all this the wrong way, and her coworkers try to convince her to ignore the evidence of her own eyes. It doesn’t take much for the not-particularly-eagle-eyed reader to piece it together, but the onus is not on Molly for her misunderstanding; but on everyone in her life who knows her intimately, who knows how her brain works and how she takes everything literally and doesn’t cope well with subterfuge, for putting her through this.

There are some unexamined factors in play here, like the fact that Molly and Juan are apparently not really paid a living wage by the Regency Grand, and that they live in penury. Prose’s prose pays special attention to the squalor and tatters that her protagonists find themselves living in, shakes it out of its head, and carries on to studiously ignore it.

The one legitimately hilarious element of this is Molly’s run-ins with her nemesis who she chose not to have fired in The Mystery Guest. A regret that she was entirely within her power to prevent, and no reader would have protested. Sometimes you don’t have to be nice for niceness’ sake.

In all honesty, this review already feels longer than The Mistletoe Mystery itself did. It is understandable what Prose wanted to achieve, but there was almost certainly a way to reach the final result while having Molly investigate a different non-mystery that it is not so distressing to her and offensive to all that she stands for.

The Mistletoe Mystery is for die-hards and completists. There is no real way to justify its Australian price tag, and it puts the “stuffed” in stocking stuffer. If The Mystery Guest already put a sour taste in your mouth, this will not help in the slightest.

Personal story time, and it’s not about when I spent the summer hanging out in a nature reserve in the deluded hope it would endear myself to my absentee father. All I saw was sky for forever … 

No. The story is about how, several years ago, I decided to almost completely cut YA fiction out of my diet. I wouldn’t say my life improved immeasurably, but my general well-being did. I still read all sorts of things, but not that many of them are about the minutia of teenagers’ lives. 

Dear Evan Hansen, a hit Broadway show and a failed movie starring Kyle Derin from Marge vs the Monorail, was also a New York Times bestselling novel. And it embodies all of the worst excesses of the genre: Evan Hansen is a solipsistic goober and the depiction of his various mental illnesses is not exactly empathetic. 

It’s hard to say if writers still have origin stories. TJ Newman wrote Falling, the jingoistic thriller about getting blackmailed into terrorism that almost displayed cognisance of the USA’s complicity in the shambolic state of the modern political atmosphere, in the downtime on long haul flights as a flight attendant. A variation of this was cribbed for the insulting fictional story for “Elly Conway”, who “wrote” Argylle between waiting tables. (I will fully admit that I spend a lot more time thinking about Argylle than most people, especially Matthew Vaughan)

Falling was a success in a time when no one was flying anywhere, let alone attempting to crash their plane into America’s beating heart. Two years later, Newman returned with Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421, a different aviation disaster: a plane sinking into the ocean and the people racing against time to save the few passengers who remained aboard. Frankly, it’s a budget version of The Poseidon Adventure for people who either haven’t seen or can’t remember anything about it (there was a song; Shelley Winters was there). It’s the sort of book that you maybe don’t regret reading, but you also can’t bring yourself to think that it was very good. And it’s awfully convenient.

In France, things are quite different to the Anglosphere. Over there, a literary author can still be a meaningful part of the commentariat, work the TV circuit, and be a cultural touchstone. This foreign character is our entrée to Lie With Me, a movie that elegantly juggles the past and present while completely eliminating any element of coincidence or chance.

Stéphane Belcourt (Guillaume de Tonquédec), in the grip of a bout of writer’s block, returns to his hometown to promote cognac through a new novella and a commencement speech at the anniversary of the distillery. His wandering attention almost immediately latches onto distillery representative Lucas Andrieu (Victor Belmondo), who he quickly realises is the son of his first love. As Stéphane struggles with how much to reveal to Lucas, he considers the heartbreak of his school years, when his younger self (Jérémy Gillet) spent a season with Thomas (Julien De Saint Jean, The Lost Boys).

Adapted from Philippe Bresson’s book, the more literal title is “Stop With Your Lies” (the English title is a legacy of book translator Molly Ringwald). Stéphane is famous for autofiction, that most peculiarly European genre, and has been lax at covering his tracks to the point that multiple of his novels have had characters named Thomas, and one was directly called Thomas Andrieu. In the original book, this extends as far as the narrator character himself being named Philippe. It’s not difficult to see the parallels.

Yet Lie With Me operates at a remove as a film; writer/director Olivier Peyon is steering, rather than Besson, and the film’s split structure offers a dynamic character study of Stéphane across decades. Peyon chooses to focus mainly on de Tonquédec and Belmondo, with the past used as background to inform the present. The two leads bounce off each other in an alternately cordial and antagonistic way, and there is a genuine back and forth that keeps the movie buoyant. The cognac focus allows for unusual developments, as the lead character is near teetotal; when it comes time for the grand speech to commence it has dramatic impact for the theatrical audience but, on a pragmatic level, you have to wonder what the guests at the cognac event were making of it.

Lie With Me has a particular Frenchness that sticks to its walls, despite the universality of its lost love ricochet backdrop. Though it helps, you don’t need a degree in French literature to unpack the meta to get something out of it; aided by strong performances from de Tonquédec and Belmondo, Peyon has taken Bresson’s work and made it his own.

Lie With Me is still pending an Australian release date.

Directed by: Olivier Peyon

Starring: Guillaume de Tonquédec, Victor Belmondo, Jérémy Gillet, Julien de Saint-Jean and Guilaine Londez

Henry Cavill has not had much luck as the face of franchises. Between non-starters like The Man From U.N.C.L.E., re-cast leads like The Witcher, and whatever trainwreck the DCEU has ended up with, there was a time when the man didn’t have a franchise to his name. This all changes in 2024, with Matthew Vaughn’s (The King’s Man) new flagship, Argylle. Cavill plays the titular hero, he’s front and centre on the poster, and … he’s barely in the movie. There’s a marginally different movie behind this artifice, but it’s one that you’ve already seen before. There’s barely a mind here, let alone a twisted one.