Nicole Watson is one of Australia’s most promising young academics. Her excellent 2009 article on the Howard government’s Northern Territory Emergency Response, published in the Borderlands e-journal, shows as much, while she also earns kudos for contributing to a feisty response (in a 2008 edition of the Alternative Law Journal) to the increasingly addle-pated blatherings of Louis Nowra. With The Boundary, a novel set in Brisbane, Watson attempts the perilous leap from scholarly criticism to popular fiction. Can she pull it off?

The Boundaryis not so much a different genre as a pot-pourri of genres: crime drama, social commentary, mystery, suspense. That ultimately the author has chomped off quite a bit more than she can chew is no huge surprise. Her omnivorousness is a terminal problem for this book. It does not preclude Watson from being a novelist of promise, if she could just settle on exactly what it is she wants to say, and how.

Since the novel is in large part a detective story based in Brisbane, I should admit that I was once a Brisbane detective. No matter: I heartily agree with Watson that a nuclear holocaust wouldn’t budge the police and lawyers (or the backpackers) who infest the concrete carbuncle that is the Roma Street precinct. Nor could anyone argue with the book’s underlying premise that the relationship between the constabulary and Brisbane’s Indigenous population remains at heart a prickly one. The police in The Boundary are unlike any I have ever known, but that hardly raises an eyebrow either – I have yet to come across a fictional detective whose life comes anywhere near to resembling the real thing in all of its paradoxical edge-of-the-seat monotony.

Watson’s characters are for the most part a world-weary bunch, wholly appropriate for an era when Julia Gillard’s environmental and refugee policies make her look increasingly like Napoleon to Howard’s Pilkington, with the heady euphoria of Rudd’s Indigenous apology already feeling such a long time ago. The legal faction as portrayed here are a suitably shabby lot, though led by a barrister whose awkward moniker of ‘golden tongue’ evokes John Laws more than Perry Mason. If Watson’s fictional newspaper, the Queensland Daily, cannot hope to match the unswerving vacuousness of the real thing, who could blame her? You can’t make that kind of stuff up.

The Boundary is a novel which begins promisingly before losing its way. For the first few chapters the tension builds nicely. Watson’s writing has a sharp, analytical style that is all her own. But as the story develops, the pages become crammed with dodgy politicians, embittered cops, sexpot female lawyers and sexually deviant male ones, substance abusers (many characters embracing two or more of these charming traits), and Indigenous mystics, until the whole thing threatens to burst apart.

The young solicitor Miranda is the most complete character. The two police officers – a sympathetic, essentially benign Aborigine and his older, wholly obscene Caucasian partner – are the most unsatisfying. The obscene detective engages in some stereotypical phone book interrogation (in eighteen years I thought I’d pretty much seen it all, but I never saw a fellow cop use a phone book for anything other than ordering pizza), before exploding into deadly violence. The nod to recent events on Palm Island in Queensland’s north is obvious. It is startling and rightly troubling, yet the absence of subtlety means that, in the end, this crucial angle in the narrative fails to convince.

By the halfway mark, the book is bulging with potential influences: The Silence of the Lambs; Joan Didion; Peter Weir’s film The Last Wave; Janet Turner Hospital; Sidney Sheldon for the grimy eroticism; Frederick Forsyth for the political paranoia. These multiple evocations are matched by the non-stop, over-the-top twists and turns. It seems a most un-Brisbane like turn of affairs when so much that is so unusual happens to so many, and Watson’s previously sleek metaphors begin to suffer accordingly. (A few miss the mark by the width of Moreton Bay, as when someone’s name rolls off the tongue ‘like a birds-eye chilli’!)

Any writer who so consciously situates her tale in Queensland’s capital will inevitably have David Malouf’s magnificent Johnno (1975) to contend with. None of the Brisbane-based novels I have read comes close to that standard. Nicole Watson’s first novel proves to be less than the sum of its multitudinous parts, but it shows enough potential to make her next literary move worth watching.