Middle age tends to be a dangerous time for James’s protagonists – family lives are apt to come under threat from past menaces in the form of a person, secret, or latent trauma. James is preoccupied with inadequate, plodding marriages that almost invite some kind of disturbance to shake their members from a middle-class stupor. With The Lost Girls, the author has improved upon this model: the themes are more nuanced; her characteristic epistolary episodes are prominent and effective; and, admirers of James will be glad to know, the dénouementis more gratifying and surprising than ever.

The Lost Girls concerns the serial murders of two young women in the 1970s: fourteen-year-old Angie – well known for her beauty in the Northern Beaches of Sydney and, among the men of Curl Curl, for her nascent sexuality – who, while visiting relations, was abducted and strangled; and a homeless runaway murdered in Kings Cross. The girls’ killer has never been found.

Angie’s relatives, the Griffin family – young Jane, who idolised Angie; Jane’s mother, who bore the responsibility for supervising her niece; her father, a police officer involved in the search for Angie and investigation; and Mick, who was infatuated with his cousin and was among the last to see her alive – are affected badly by Angie’s murder. Theirs are lame, stagnant lives. Mick, now an adult, suffers from alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder. Jane’s father is confined to a nursing home with psychosomatic symptoms of vegetation­­: blind, deaf, mute. The family suffers from monumental repression on a Freudian scale. In the father’s case, it has manifested literally, although James is usually subtler than that.

Jane, who was only twelve when Angie was murdered, is now the proprietor of an antiques store. Despondent at the prospect of retirement and frustrated in her marriage, she agrees to participate when she is approached for a radio documentary about the aftermath of murder. The novel is structured around the transcripts from Jane’s and other characters’ interviews, and the reasons for the tyrannical secrecy maintained by the Griffin family emerge gradually through these Rashomon-like accounts. These perspectives are looped through flashbacks that establish the context of the events which took place in 1978. The interviewer, a journalist who, under the auspices of exploring the family’s grief, aims to get to the bottom of the ‘questions’ still surrounding the murders, is a shady character.

This psychological thriller is light on thrills and heavy on psychology. There are a few too many ponderous meditations on the nature of the past and memory, redemption and paralysis, though these give substance to the plot, which would otherwise have become gratuitous or pulpy. Readers will find these asides either annoying or edifying.

It is to James’s credit that her minor characters are well formed; although their presence is equally brief, their motives, sentiments, and behaviour are credible. This is partly thanks to the author’s control of her characters’ discrete voices, including a skill for rendering the vernacular (‘His girlfriend Alison is a year older than him and a deadset spunk, tits out to here, an arse you could eat’) and authentic, hard-working dialogue that only occasionally lapses in tone or mutates throughout the novel (such as Jane’s daughter, a dense and trivial ‘millennial’ who starts out as a frothy teen, but then takes on more larrikin tones). James is also a capable raconteur, which contributes to her mellow, rounded depiction of suburban Australian life, including one scene in which Jane sits in the lap of her sour old great-aunt as a toddler and, much to the woman’s dismay, ‘squeezed her massive breast and said in my baby lisp, Honk honk’. James, whose style is emphatic, often lists things in groups of threes (‘vivid, energetic, full of life’; ‘carefree, confident, fearless’); this is usually rewarding, but sometimes tautological.

The novel’s peripheral murder – of the teenage runaway in the Cross – is critical and yet distant to the Griffin family’s experience. The book’s title alludes to Peter Pan and his Lost Boys of the Neverland, who are ‘thinned out’ by Peter before they can grow up. The young runaway is one of James’s eponymous lost girls, as is Angie, who is stuck in time, always fourteen, and whose life is truncated and tainted by the nature of her gruesome death; and Jane, whose own life has been constrained by her early experience of mortality. James’s male characters are also ‘lost’, the pattern of trauma and grief broken only with the next generation. The Lost Girls is polished and absorbing. Wendy James has again demonstrated her flair for suspenseful diversion, buttressed by her not inconsiderable literary talent.