Category: Books

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.

It’s always¹ advisable, when you’re not feeling one book, to stop it at a quarter in and then go to the author’s previous title. Time of the Child, one of the picks for Christmas 2024, seemed difficult to get into; the chapters were very long, the breaks were few, and the narrative kept referring to earlier events in the village. Picking up This Is Happiness, to see what Niall Williams had previously written about the Irish village of Faha, is an instantly rewarding experience.²

Of course, eventually you will figure out that this is the second Faha novel. The first is called History of the Rain, and the entirety of the first chapter of This Is Happiness is “The rain had stopped.” But you don’t feel like you’ve lost any important information by starting here.

In 1958, the town of Faha sees sunshine for the first time in years. Seventeen year old seminary drop out Noe Crowe is visiting with his grandparents, Ganga and Doady, when the coming of the electricity is announced. Enlisted into helping lodger Christy collect signatures to allow the power poles to be constructed, Noe goes through the warm season feeling the old world inching towards the new — all from the vantage point of someone who has lived with electricity in Dublin all his life.

Told exclusively from Noe’s first person point of view at a sixty year remove, This is Happiness boasts the omniscience of age rather than of someone who knows and perceives everything. This is a folk tale told by someone who lived through part of it and gathered the rest. Noe’s surmise is the engine that powers the telling, and he is a charming host. 

This means that the parts of the novel that are explicitly “seventeen”, like his dalliances with the Troy sisters, are ill-considered and awkward. They ring true enough, but there is a largely baffling chunk about visiting the cinema in town and what ensues in the dark. Perhaps because you already know that it’s a fruitless endeavour, that Noe is merely embarrassing himself, you want to elide it; the juxtaposition of Noe’s amateur hour longing with the endurance of Christy’s throws their relative significance into relief.

What it really shows is that, in This is Happiness, Noe is primarily an observer and reporter. We feel for him and the reason for his loss of faith, but we’re more interested in him in relation to his family and to Christy than to his openly admitted hopeless romances. A Spring season spent attempting to mend a love gone for half a century, and chasing after an elusive master musician, is always going to be more interesting than a fumble in the dark — and you can tell, ultimately, which had more impact on the boy and the man.

Through Noe, Williams captures a moment in Irish history with charm and wit. With the rain gone, Faha can breathe and so too can the reader. This Is Happiness is generous and expansive, amusing and quietly touching. There is event, but it is largely defined by character; it is rare to see a novel with such exquisitely defined start and end points.

This is Happiness is such a satisfying piece that it gives strength for one to reconsider tackling Time of the Child, which was instantly denser, less inviting in its composition. Not once does it feel like homework, but rather something that might have been nice to read years ago. Still, there’s no time like the present, or like Ireland in 1958, when the crackle of electricity was in the air and young love was as foolish as it ever was.

1. Rarely. ↩︎
2. But also, and this is truly objective: maybe the lead up to Christmas and wind down of the working year isn’t the best headspace for reading. ↩︎

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. 

Dervla McTiernan’s Australian-set story is much better than her American tales, but it does smack of the grift that a series of Australian authors seem to have with Audible at the moment (more power to them) and isn’t as fleshed out as a full novel – even if it’s only 25% shorter than the execrable Nina.

Two separate narrators tell the stories of Flynn and Noah, who basically have a parade of misfortunes thrown at them in their respective youths, the sort of tribulations that would have seemed gratuitous to Job. When their stories dovetail, very, very late in the piece (seriously, by the time you get to anything in the blurb, it’s almost over), McTiernan goes into overdrive and puts in one detail too many about the web our heroes found themselves entangled in.

Sterling work from Ben Chapple and Harriet Gordon-Anderson grounds the story somewhat, but you do have to wonder how bloodthirsty and sensational the modern McTiernan is. There are some absolute clunker sentences that would never make it on a page, but The Fireground is keen and some of the characters eventually make somewhat sensible decisions. Really, how long can the silliness last?

We’re only two Bosch novels in and already the man finds himself fighting a bull. It’s difficult not to think “we’re at this point already?” For a policeman who is supposed to be grounded in his approach to the law, Bosch finds himself caught up in multiple flights of fancy in The Black Ice. It’s hard to say whether he does more or less bad police work than in his previous outing, but he’s still a fun guy to hang around.

What they don’t tell you about ageing is that you get tired of cynical corporate synergy movie tie-in exercises. In a brighter, more innocent world, someone might see Argylle, the novel released one month ahead of a movie of the same name that is not based on the novel but is instead based on a “fictionalised” version of the author of the novel, who probably doesn’t exist, and say “Wow! The thin gruel of this spy novel is great grist for the mill of a metanarrative from one of the more irritating auteurs of the 21st century!”
The wide-eyed ingenue who might have thought that died years ago, and in his place is someone just shy of forty who can almost see through the thin veneer – and yet is still not smart enough to opt out entirely.

Hixploitation! Scott Von Doviak is a genre man par excellence. What he did for multigenerational heist mysteries in Charlesgate Confidential he does for murderous road movies in Lowdown Road. This is the sort of book designed to be read in a day, if not a single sitting. It’s Hard Case Crime, so you know you’re there to, at the very least, bask in the cover.