At an exhibition of Karlson’s relics in the Queensland Art Gallery, Caddie – or ‘Cadence’, named for the heroine of Karlson’s famous (and only) published work – meets an enigmatic older woman, Rachel, who seems familiar with Karlson’s much-anticipated second novel, the manuscript and all copies of which were lost, along with her publisher/editor, in the same blaze. If Caddie can locate the woman again, can she illuminate what happened all those years ago? Might some remnant of the book, extant at present only in the eponymous charred fragments on display, remain in her ageing memory?

Toni Jordan is capable of luscious prose (written in the ubiquitous present tense), drily witty and idiomatic dialogue, and acute personal observation. Jordan’s 1980s Brisbane is delightfully daggy: the Gallery there is ‘world class’; cocktail onions are dyed the vivid hues of traffic lights; on a sweltering morning, the heroine stands in her kitchen in her knickers before her open freezer to cool herself. A slightly eccentric antiquarian bookseller reveals his personality neatly through his Scrabble habits: where Caddie carefully arranges and rearranges her tiles on their rack according to possibilities, Jamie leaves his letters in their random order, canvassing possibilities entirely in his mind, like a chess player. Jordan also produces a satisfying villain: the handsome, calculating, and ambitious Philip, a University of Queensland English lecturer who serially seduces his female students.

Interspersed with these Brisbane interludes are succinct sketches of Rachel’s life in pre-war America, from her childhood on a Pennsylvania farm and youthful labour in a silk mill, to 1930s New York just after the Prohibition years. Here is a city replete with other young and impoverished immigrants, Irish and European, who eke out an existence in tenements in Hell’s Kitchen and work as browbeaten waitresses at Schrafft’s, a popular chain of restaurants. For Rachel, an accidental meeting with the Austrian-born Inga, rich and now much sought after, represents an entrée into a racier and more glamorous world.

The city was laced with tiny treasures that she alone noticed: golden, robed statues on top of traffic lights; patterns made by the morning sun reflecting on canyons of marble and granite. The power of this city. The arrogance of all that steel piercing the sky – and the men pulling handcarts stacked with lumber in Chinatown, like another country altogether.

Jordan’s plot hangs together tenuously in parts, relying on a series of unlikely events, and the writing is sometimes uneven, striving for a height that it does not consistently achieve. There is a degree of literary namedropping in the build-up – Cervantes, Akhmatova, Ayn Rand, Rilke, Burroughs, Lessing, and E.M. Forster – while some rather heavy-handed parallels are drawn with Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird. We learn little of Inga Karlson’s own inspirational first novel beyond the fact that, while galvanising a generation of American readers, it has raised the ire of American Nazi sympathisers. Conflicted by her own precocious literary success, Karlson herself is both reticent and self-dramatising. At the end, we still have little idea of what made her tick.

The denouement is neat, but the author struggles to reach it via a cluster of seemingly illogical actions and characters whose motivations are not quite convincingly conveyed. The ending feels over-hasty and clumsily managed. This may be rather nit-picking with a fast-paced novel transparently aimed at the popular market.

Toni Jordan (photograph by James Penlidis)Jordan was born in Brisbane in 1966 and now lives in Melbourne. A former molecular biologist and marketing manager for a vitamin company, she has told interviewers that she fell into novel-writing almost by accident, by way of an RMIT course intended to improve her copywriting. Perhaps it is this unconventional approach and lack of pretension that has led to her undeniable success in the field. Among four previous novels, the first, Addition (2008), was published internationally and achieved a long-listing in the Miles Franklin Award. The second, Fall Girl (2011), a romantic comedy, sold internationally and was optioned for a feature film. Her third, Nine Days (2013), a family drama set in the era of World War II, received accolades. Our Tiny, Useless Hearts (2016), promoted as a witty examination of modern marriage, was shortlisted for the 2017 Voss Literary Prize.

In this latest novel, with its moments of poignancy interspersed with episodes of farce, Jordan has not settled yet on whether to aim for literary realism or light comedy. Best described as quality chick-lit with highbrow overtones and a murder mystery thrown in, The Fragments should attain the same popular success as Jordan’s previous works. The pleasures offered by the freshness of the writing and the intricacy of the story compensate for its occasional flaws of implausibility.