Thanks to the insights offered via Angela, a psychoanalyst, the novel swerves towards more profound questions than who did what. It owes its title to the idea that every patient of psychoanalysis ‘believes they’re guilty of a crime’. Indeed, the characters’ ‘crimes’ are ambiguous rather than fully articulated; it is difficult to divide her characters – well drawn and psychologically nuanced – into the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’.

Capp inhabits each character effortlessly, communicating subtle distinctions in gender and background through their observations, if occasionally labouring their back-stories. The exterior world is described with pictorial rigour (one example: cormorants dive ‘like heat-seeking missiles’). Questions of class mobility underpin the novel, making the Mornington Peninsula backdrop appropriate, where sleek architectural monuments displace fibro shacks: not far away on Melbourne’s port, ‘a container ship silently cleaving the water’.

To Know My Crime morphs into an examination of the nature of love and its attendant responsibilities. Accordingly to Angela, ‘Romantic love’ is ‘pathology’, though the quietly devastating conclusion to this finely calibrated novel proves her thoroughly wrong.