Category: Books

So Old, So Young’s main trap is that Ginder writes as if the gay characters have to follow the rules passed down from publishers of old: they can only have so much screen time and there are only a limited number of outcomes they can have. Adam is the perfect specimen of a man, only glimpsed in passing (although, and the book never judges this, he commits one act that feels at best cruel and at worst murderous), and Richie is the perpetual fuck-up who loses his charms as he ages out of alcoholism and substance abuse being socially acceptable. They are two characters who could shine if the novel was ever allowed to be about them, but no: despite the multiple perspectives, So Old, So Young is about Mia.

Stop me if you’ve read a book about a woman whose hubris lets her ideal man get away in her younger years, who dates a creep because she thinks that’s what she deserves, and then worries that her pursuit of a career has ruined her chance of having a child. This roaringly stock standard scenario is what Ginder ultimately settles on for his through line. You can’t say “but there’s an ensemble who all live different lives to Mia,” because they lack her interiority and exposure. A lot of what this book adds up to is the characters mentally cataloguing their resentments against each other for making different choices to the ones they would themselves have made. By the time you reach 2022 you do wonder why these characters are still in each other’s lives: the American novelist really cannot accept that people do drift apart either naturally or for specific reasons. 2024, the funeral threatened in the prologue, is naturally a time for reconciliation, but some of these people don’t recognise themselves at this point, let alone each other.

One thing that can be said for it is that these characters read as so anxious that they will throw many anxious readers’ real world anxieties into relief, like “I’m not that bad,” a lesser form of the misery tourism that is endemic to so much of modern publishing.

It’s easy to see why So Old, So Young could work for some: if Mia’s story feels somehow fresh, then certainly her dominance of the timelines could be charming; others may argue that Ginder gives exactly the right amount of exposure to his ensemble rather than paying them lip service. But So Old, So Young feels spread too thin in most places and too thick in others. You come to know one character very well and the rest weave in and out of the narrative like wraiths. If you can’t know Marco, you can’t know why Mia is hung up on him; one of the sextet that this book is about doesn’t even get a single viewpoint chapter, and that renders Sasha weaker by contrast. It’s also a decision to show these people at the junctures where their problems are far outweighed by the relative privilege and comfort that they find themselves in — you would be hard pressed to find lives more luxe than those described in 2022. If you have a book deal, an international career, and movie option, you’re doing okay. Maybe you should stop measuring your life by the microaggression.

So Old, So Young is a book with a heart, but that heart is in the wrong place. By focusing on the most satellite member of the group, the one who appears to remove herself from most equations, Ginder has left us with a fairly rote “can a woman have it all?” exercise that gives particularly short shrift to its gays. There are moments that may affect the reader, but So Old, So Young is too scattershot to care that much. You deserve better friends than these, and they deserve better than each other.

The title should have been a clue. If the term “disaster gay” irritates you (although normally you hear the term “disaster bisexual”, so, erasure), then this is not the book for you. Furthermore, the title is a misnomer: this book is a pilot episode with no detective agency, even metaphorically, and more than that, it’s a goddamn spy novel. This is a caper novel that triggers so many pitfalls that author Lev AC Rosen spends most of the book digging his way out of them, featuring staggeringly  unintelligent decisions on the part of his ensemble, and an approach to story structure that is frequently exhausting. 

Hotel concierge Brandon is an inveterate romantic, constantly falling in love with men who don’t feel the same way. When a one night stand with a guest results in an early checkout with the guest’s phone left behind, Brandon goes on the hunt. Helping him on his quest are Ollie, a gummy guzzling dog walker, Nicole, a workaholic lawyer, and Ian, a drag queen and book shop clerk with anger management issues. When, instead of finding the guest, Brandon witnesses a murder, the entire crew is plunged into chaos.

This sort of book depends on several elements to work: brisk storytelling and compelling (or entertaining) characters. Rosen’s chapters are the sort of length that would not matter in a book that was not split into quadrants, but this is not a story that jumps around. As such, you get the group chat between the characters regurgitated every chapter, albeit sometimes with some editorialising from the currently featured player. These play-by-plays of their lives are never interesting and often you have to ask if these characters even like each other. People drift from their college friends all the time, but they replace them with new circles and move on with their lives. Rosen has arrested the quartet’s development not for any real psychological reasons but simply from narrative convenience. 

It doesn’t help that most of the novel’s progression is reserved for the Ian chapters, which almost always end on a cliffhanger. For all of the group chats, no one shares important information with each other, choosing instead the “gentle ribbing” banter that gets old fast. Periodically we’re treated to an interstitial for a mysterious unnamed fifth character, but these parts are so poorly integrated that they catch the reader off guard almost every time; there should either be more or fewer of them. For a book that takes place over a relatively short stretch of time, it certainly drags itself out, and never understands that mystery and espionage aren’t quite the same thing.

The insult compounds itself in the later stages, when Rosen is trying to bring things to a head but has hamstrung himself through the choices of having four separate focal characters and making all of them long. When the game night that has been threatened throughout the book is finally staged, we have to read through it four times, with the dialogue reproduced almost in its entirety — very little elision here — and the only points of difference being when the characters finally branch off from one another. At a time when you would most want momentum, the book grinds to a halt.

On top of this, this is the moment that Brandon chooses to snap, but in a way that makes it clear that his mentality is dangerously unstable rather than that his friends — damaged though they all are, in a pseudo-literary fashion — have treated him wrong. What’s supposed to be funny comes off as sad, and to top it off we have to read the exact same meltdown four times. It’s not a cathartic moment, and there’s no release: it’s just the complete realisation of a delusion that up to this point had only been threatened. Of all of the paper thin characters in The Disaster Gay Detective Agency, the nominal prime protagonist proves to be the worst of them all.

By the time we escape that horrible gathering, Rosen shifts for the first time to zippy chapters as if he knows that he’s against the clock if he wants to get the book done within 400 pages. At this eleventh hour The Disaster Gay Detective Agency finally feels like the caper that Rosen wanted it to be. It’s a classic feel that hearkens back to the double, triple, and quadruple crossing plots of countless pseudo-cosies of yore, but it’s too little, too late. And, on top of that, it’s too silly to count.

Rosen’s previous mysteries were all period pieces. The Disaster Gay Detective Agency is painfully au courant. Maybe that means that it’s for people with a modern sensibility, who enjoy characters who can’t manage to form the semblance of a functioning person between themselves. But if that’s the case, why are they always watching The Nanny? This is a pilot novel: although the plot is resolved, it’s merely setting up a franchise. This book can’t be recommended in good conscience, even if a quarter (half, if we’re being generous) of its title ends up being true. Not every book needs to be elegant, but most of them shouldn’t be as thrown together as this one. 

An Advanced Reader Copy was provided by Poisoned Pen Press for review.

Stuart Douglas has written two excellent novels to date, but they were undeniably heavy. Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo, with their distinctive names, are not exactly laugh riots. Douglas’ third novel, John of John, continues the trend of being named for a character, but it has a slightly lighter spring in its step. Very serious matters happen between these pages, and yet our titular protagonist won’t let it get him down.

When John-Calum Macleod is informed that his grandmother is dying, he returns to his home island of Harris to help maintain the household with his taciturn and devout father, John. But grandmother Ella doesn’t seem to need Cal, and John only wants Cal to do exactly as he’s told. Discouraged by his lack of success on the mainland, Cal finds himself wondering if things will be any better for him on Harris or if his business is going to inevitably become everyone else’s once more and if what little liberation he has claimed for himself will have to be tamped back down. Despite their diametrically opposed beliefs and lifestyles, Cal and John might have more in common than either suspects.

Set in the late nineties, John of John is redolent with detail that could only be provided with someone intimately familiar with the Scottish textile industry of the time: the licensing involved in weaving, the specific “signature” that each loom bears, and the effort that it takes to survive on a depressed island. John of John is a very specific novel, and the way that Stuart crystallises his time and place is an essential part of its enjoyment.

John of John is Stuart’s first foray into a novel with multiple viewpoints, providing separate stories for both Johns. We are privy to knowledge about father and son that each hopes that the other will never find out; a split-level multigenerational gambit that pays off in ways that neither understands. John is a tyrant of a patriarch, but in a way that we’re able to comprehend and develop sympathy for, even as certain actions surely condemn him. At times, John seems more important than Cal, but that’s the beauty of John of John: each part is defined by the other.

Ella, the lynchpin of the family, and unwilling host of John, is as much if not more of an outcast as Cal. Her Glaswegian nature marks her as more Other than a boy born and raised on the island, no matter how different Cal might be. Surrounded by people who exclude her through use of the Gaelic tongue (which heads each chapter), Ella presents another aspect of grappling with identity in a hostile place when you’re From Away. This trinity forms the novel, but Stuart has many more elements to recommend the piece. 

The supporting cast embody the spirit of a small island in Scotland without stooping to caricature.  They populate the novel and bring it to life, preventing the Macleods or Ella from existing in an empty expanse. The MacInnes brothers could have been quaint parochial archetypes in the hands of another author, but here they provide the backbone to John’s story. The Macdonald clan, from promising Isla to the constantly thwarted Doll, similarly inform Cal’s own experience. Stuart has endowed all of these characters with a credibility that brings John of John to life. The book feels vital and lived in: a piece on the cusp of a new era for Scotland, for better and worse.

Though this is a novel more of person and place than plot, John of John is a “year in the life” type of novel, and time marches through it. Informed by the history of the place and its people, the changing perspectives of a father, son, and grandmother as they learn more of each other, it’s not about the event but the development. Things happen here, both within the characters and without. There’s a flow and a give and take, but it’s never strictly about what happens. The infinite tiny shifts that move us through our days bring these people to a conclusion that is not inevitable so much as it is understandable. No one is as they were at the beginning of John of John, and while they don’t escape unscathed, it’s fascinating to watch them get there.

If it proves nothing else, John of John shows in short order that Douglas Stuart has not simply written the same book three times. The agency granted to these characters that was denied the others opens their worlds up, even as various strictures bring them down. This is a carefully constructed novel, right down to the cover: though it may be rain spattered, it depicts light emerging from beyond the clouds. Though undeniably wet, John of John allows the reader that most elusive of emotions granted by books: optimism. Stuart’s third novel is his most accomplished yet, and demands to be relished.

An Advanced Reader Copy was provided by Grove Press for review.

It would be wrong to suggest that publishing is astroturfed, but it’s definitely 5000% true that if publishers want to push something, it’s going to be everywhere. That’s how the overnight success of Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear, pre-optioned by Amazon with Anne Hathaway attached and specifically thanked in the acknowledgements, happened. It mushroomed everywhere, and almost immediately the discourse became “is Yesteryear worth the hype?” My literary media in Christ, you’re the ones who pushed it! But the answer is … it’s all right. It just doesn’t hold up to any degree of scrutiny.

“My name is Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.” 

Natalie Mills is the face of Yesteryear, a homesteading brand that recalls the antebellum US, but you’d better not call her a tradwife. On the day after she experiences more than a little trouble behind the scenes of her perfect life, Natalie wakes up to find that she appears to be living in the 1855 she so eloquently espouses on her channels – with none of the modern conveniences, cameras, or nannies, that helped her get through the day-to-day. Stuck with a husband who looks like an older version of her “real” husband Caleb, who is distant at best, and an uncanny valley of children who resemble but are not those she is used to, Natalie is desperate to return in the other direction.

A different novel would have focused heavily on Natalie’s 1855 lifestyle, but Burke is merciful. Interlaced between the 1855 segments, which come to feel as much of a bad dream to the reader as they do to the subject, is Natalie’s life story to date: from her friendless childhood with a pretend dead father, to her friendless college tenure with a roommate she equally could not stand but was also fixated on, and to her fledgling relationship with God’s dumbest soldier.

Natalie is a fascinating character primarily because she is often close to seeing the truth of the society that she has chosen to live in, but then she gets it horribly wrong. Every time there’s a potential breakthrough or an event makes her look like she could be a sympathetic figure, she says or does something so horrible that you feel like she’s not worth saving or caring about. Burke has written Natalie as a supremely unreliable narrator, even to herself. The perspective is so close that you can’t tell how much is reality and how much is fabrication. There are blink-and-you’ll-miss-them moments of revelation of character that will force you to go back and reread earlier passages to make you realise that an assessment you felt was unfair may have had some truth to it. You can, and you must, hold in your head the twin concepts that Natalie is a bad person but also that she is treated unfairly.

Yesteryear falls into an uneasy understanding of modern social media and all its many tentacles; Caleb falls victim to many granular forums that sell him a deadly cocktail of what to believe and what he wants to believe, ignoring that in recent years much of this content is now on the wide open mesas of the internet rather than hiding out in specialist venues. Caleb is one of Burke’s more curious creations, as she wants to simultaneously showcase him as a corrupted simpleton and a Machiavellian prince. 

Other characters are not so well filled out: Amelia, Caleb’s mother, is an inconsistent sketch of a woman, a failed depiction of the permanently zonked out wife of a professional Republican campaigner. It takes too long for Amelia’s secondary character to reveal itself, at which point it does not ring true, and it never makes sense that she (badly) cooks the family dinner every night when she has an army of invisible maids at her disposal. Here Burke’s satire fails due to a lack of clarity of purpose, and she falls into easy caricature. Amelia is not enough of a person in any direction to feel sorrow or contempt for, and it’s difficult to place that blame at Natalie’s feet rather than Burke’s.

Yet in the end it feels like the facade falls not from Natalie, but from Burke herself. Having written herself into a corner with the possible divine or science-fictional punishment of our “heroine”, Burke just throws everything up in the air and hopes that it lands in a satisfactory matter. But Yesteryear stretches the boundaries of disbelief in a way that does not justify anything that came before it.

Is Burke sadistic? There’s a distinct sense that Yesteryear is giving its protagonist her comeuppance, but any time that she suffers or is abused in the 1855 timeline, it merely feels like she is suffering or being abused. We are too close to the character to feel that she’s getting just deserts, which are frequent and horrible. At times it feels like Burke is trying to recreate a version of The Handmaid’s Tale where Offred secretly deserves her treatment, but realistically no one does, no matter how ironic the punishment.

The real question is does Yesteryear need its “time travel” gimmick? Apart from anything else, that smacks of genre, and seems more likely to turn readers away than draw them in. But more than that, the 1855 timeline isn’t a logical conclusion, it just throws into relief that Yesteryear could have been told in a close enough to linear fashion without suffering in the least; benefiting from it, even. It’s understandable that a book needs a hook if it wants to make it in the cut throat world of publishing (even when the book is anointed by its publisher?), but sometimes a thesis gets in the way of itself.

Yesteryear offers few easy answers, but asks the reader to swallow the last thirty pages and like them without trying to assimilate them with anything that they know, either internally or externally. If you think about it, and Yesteryear is designed as a “makes you think” piece, nothing makes sense either psychologically or legalistically. Can you duff something so badly and for so many pages that a partially affecting epilogue can pay for all? That’s what Burke is counting on, and that’s what she doesn’t deliver. Yesteryear eventually becomes propulsive, but its multiple frustrations pile up and somehow it becomes less than the sum of its parts. Maybe Anne Hathaway can justify it, but you could be forgiven for feeling that it’s just so much empty hype.

In the literary world, hyper fixations and stories written to entertain your friends can be noble pursuits: famously, Frankenstein and The Vampyre, the source of much modern literary vampire mythology,  both sprang from the same friendly competition in a winter of discontent. The Ministry of Time, born of 2020 isolation and  a fixation on The Terror, is no Frankenstein, but it reads exactly as if it was written for Kaliane Bradley’s friends. 

Whether it succeeds is partly up to how likely you would consider yourself Bradley’s friend, and partly up to how game you are to read fan fiction about a real historical figure that the author is clearly exceptionally horny for. The Ministry of Time drips with lust at the expense of intrigue, so how you take it really depends on which book you want to read.

In the near future, time travel has been discovered and is run out of a facility in London by the newly created Ministry of Time. Our unnamed narrator, the daughter of a Cambodian refugee, is brought on by the Ministry to help acclimatise one of several “expats”, people plucked from time on the grounds that they were going to to die anyway, to the modern era. The narrator is assigned Commander Graham Gore, late of the Erebus and the Franklin expedition, and she is immediately smitten by him. There’s some light intrigue in the background — is there a mole in the Ministry? who is this Brigadier who keeps showing up and asking probing questions? — but much of that is subsumed by the narrator’s unbridled lust.

The normal things that you’d expect in a time traveling fish out of water story are present in The Ministry of Time: Gore is fascinated by modern technology, disapproves of cinema, and is handsome in a way that the men of the 21st century are simply incapable – albeit shorter. His closest displaced companions are more interested in other aspects of the time, like the freedom to be homosexual and not die of the plague (admittedly, two major perks if you’re both inclined that way and don’t want to die). Other expats are less capable of being cured of their bigotries or, quite simply, are not as interesting to Bradley.

Towards the end, far too late to count as a real third act, Bradley starts suggesting that the vague intrigue that has been sprinkled lightly throughout might be leading somewhere. And it does, but in a way that has been really underdeveloped all throughout. The narrator is fundamentally uncurious about the Ministry and what they do because she is so unbearably besotted that nothing matters to her beyond Gore. Realistically the narrator should be on permanently high alert because her position is unprecedented and there’s much to learn and there’s the occasional political assassination. But she’s not. She doesn’t care at all, and so the reader is barely exposed to the actual nuts and bolts of this profession except to learn that Gore is as good at the job that he gives himself as the narrator is bad at her own. Often The Ministry of Time feels like reading the story of a janitor at MI6, except the janitor doesn’t show up to work most days and when they do they spend most of it cataloguing and analysing micro-aggresions in minute detail, not noticing that a covert nuclear war is being waged and countered in the foreground.

Given that this book is written as a retrospective letter to an unknown recipient, when you read about those micro-aggressions they’re couched in terms of “I should have answered this way” or “that was the moment it all went wrong for me.” The narrator only really worries about how she talks to her female colleagues, and that’s almost exclusively through the prism of race. This is when The Ministry of Time swings towards the didactic and it does not do either of its recipients, co-worker Simellia and big boss Adela, any favours. If anything it hardens the audience against them even as the narrator expresses her regret, and it perhaps says more about professional gender politics than may have been intended.

Beyond this, apart from writing the book as a bodice ripper with limited bodices for the ripping, Bradley has a tendency towards the memeish in her writing. If you paraphrase the “normal to want and possible to achieve” tweet in your text without comment, it feels like a failure of the imagination. Yet the end matter of this edition suggests that The Ministry of Time is funny. Humour, like time itself, is subjective. The standard issue fish out of water stuff combined with a minor case of online poisoning works against this book’s favour.

Yet for its many flaws, The Ministry of Time wants to be a good book; it just wants the reader to do more work than it has done itself. For all the tweeness, Gore, Arthur and Maggie are somewhat charming and it’s quite possible to care for them. The narrator is nothing if not accommodating, and acknowledges her tunnel vision. There’s a deep mechanics of time travel that is, again, only superficially touched on, and no real room or call for a sequel. The intrigue, though half-baked by the time it emerges, is genuinely intriguing, there’s just not enough of a breadcrumb trail and the nature of the loop is nearly entirely unexplored. It’s actually bizarre how much the narrator does not care and where her priorities lie, because Bradley really could have had it both ways – particularly if someone who had used the internet had edited it before thrusting it upon an unsuspecting, although remarkably receptive, public. The strengths of The Ministry of Time are not as multifarious as its flaws, but they do elevate it into something somewhat worth reading.

If the imbalance of The Ministry of Time does not bother you – if you’re fine with something that is structured as largely slice-of-life material with a smattering of drama towards the end – then it can be quite successful. A romance-forward time travel novel can still be quite weighty thematically, but The Ministry of Time comes across as gossamer thin. Almost all of the thought-provocation that goes with its tripartite elements — time travel, intrigue, romance — is left off the page until almost the last second. With no time to breathe or grow, we’re left with what little we’re given. This won awards and presumably made Bradley’s friends very happy in a cold and dark time. Maybe that’s enough.

THE MINISTRY OF TIME | By Kaliane Bradley | Hachette Australia | 368 Pages

The whole world is astroturfed, we know this much. It’s how I Think We’ve Been Here Before ended up in my lap, probably – it’s published by Lake Union Press, which is owned by Amazon, and it was promoted as one of the Goodreads books of the year despite being published in December 2024. Without the need to feed the gamification ending that is modern Goodreads, many readers likely would not have even thought to try I Think We’ve Been Here Before. It’s very low key, but it’s also entirely divorced from human nature in a way that never rings true, despite the elevated concept.

In October, news reports announce that an astronomical event will see the world destroyed by Christmas time. A family in a small Canadian town are in peril: the patriarch is inured to the concept because he has a terminal illness anyway; the matriarch can’t reach her daughter in Berlin; the daughter, unable to book a flight home, refuses to answer her phone. All the while, they have an intense feeling of deja vu, but surely the world hasn’t ended before.

Krause has two huge deal breakers that make the book near impossible to take: Nora’s inability to answer her mother’s calls for two weeks discounts most sympathies the reader is able to have; a twelve year old disappears without trace for three weeks and his parents only marginally freak out. If this was a non-apocalyptic book they’d be apoplectic; that global doom is imminent means you think they would be more desperate for the reunion.

Nobody says that people need to face the end of the world in panic; there’s a lot to recommend taking it in your stride, but who’s to says how any of us would tackle the inevitable? But Krause has preserved her characters in a sort of amber sludge where they don’t care about anything, particularly. It’s not nihilism, but an indifference that is neither credible nor distressing. Krause’s touch is so gentle that for the most part you can only feel either contempt or disdain towards.

It’s one thing for the people of a small Canadian town where nothing ever happens to be this way (if anything, they should care more), and another for the streets of Berlin that are portrayed as if they have almost no one in them, without ever explaining where anyone has gone.

This said, I can be a sucker for ends of the world when an author is brave enough to commit to them. I Think We’ve Been Here Before does, in fact, have an ending that is both stronger than anything that came before it while still feeling like it was informed by what came before it. It’s not enough, but it’s a valiant effort on Krause’s part.

I Think We’ve Been Here Before has the kernel of an interesting idea hiding in it, but Krause never really allows it to germinate, and it has an artificial air that is so intoxicating to people who enjoy reading books where the characters aren’t easily mistaken for humans. The word “cozy” has been bandied about to describe this sort of fuzzy hug of a book divorced from reality, but readers would do well remember that coziness can be suffocating. There’s no breathing room in this novel, but at the very least it thematically hits the mark for an end of year read.

Free yourself from the chains of Goodreads challenges.

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.