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At a party held by high-flying property developer Joseph McGilvray, wealthy guests have gathered and are eating bad finger-food and quaffing alcoholic beverages when the host’s wife, Alice, is unceremoniously kidnapped. The police are summoned and all at the party become potential suspects. Anne O’Leary, who narrates this story, is friend to the McGilvrays’ son, working for them and living in their converted garage, so has a bird’s-eye view of the drama as it unfolds. She soon adopts the role of amateur sleuth. Described as ‘an Australian thriller’ on the book’s cover, this is Rae Litting’s debut novel, and it would fit snugly within the subgenre known among crime readers as a ‘cosy’ (think Agatha Christie). Despite the 20-year-old narrator and contemporary setting, this novel is old-fashioned in style, and incongruities abound as a result. Anne O’Leary often sounds more like an elderly woman than someone just out of their teens, (referring to a young police officer as a ‘whippersnapper’, for instance) and characters are a tad clichéd. The novel does, however, move at a cracking pace and has sufficient twists and turns to keep the reader guessing and ‘cosy’ fans entertained.

Deborah Crabtree is a Melbourne-based fiction writer, bookseller, and judge in this year’s Ned Kelly Crime Writing Awards

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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