Castles in interested in the fine line between keeping an eye on someone out of concern for their welfare, and the intrusive and ultimately predatory impulses that cause people to gossip and, in the extreme, to stalk the object of their obsession. Her characters are complex enough to bear the weight of this psychological concern. Kane, the catalyst for the novel’s tension, is a defensive stoner on the brink or psychosis. He is convincingly creepy. Escaping from a dissolute life of drugs and violence further up the coast, he promises his mother that he will stop smoking, get a job and stay away from his old friends. His first step is to take up the lease on a drab shed at the bottom of Rose’s garden. Her kind and easygoing demeanour disarms him. After they have a one-night stand, he begins to fixate upon her as a solution to his unhappiness. Castles is deft enough to draw Kane’s character with sensitivity: he is not a clichéd villain, nor is he merely a misunderstood, unloved youth; and the latent violence in his emotional instability is well realised. His twisted, scrawny, dope-fiend machismo becomes an effective counterpoint to the old-fashioned, hard-drinking river men, who think nothing of running vigilante mobs when they believe their interests are being threatened or that certain people need sorting out.

The persistent symbolism of baptism and rebirth is delicately handled, from the title of the novel to the final pages. Castles uses the quietness of the river, its distinctive hidden waterholes and inlets, to great effect. The presence of the land and sea is constant: sometimes peaceful, sometimes malevolent. This dramatic backdrop at once feeds the symbolic world of the novel, diluting it with its immensity and the comparative smallness of human concerns. The reader gains an understanding of why the place attracts these people; how its sandstone cliffs, scrubby bush and the tidal ebb and flow over mud and sand can act as a kind of salve. Castles does not, however, burden her narrative with lush, quasi-poetic language. Cranky old Tom Shepherd, Rose’s neighbour, uses arson as a way of cleansing the landscape, seeing his fire and the emergency sideshow it attracts as an entertaining distraction from painful thoughts about the past: ‘The sound of the brush crackling, the smoky, scorching wind, the water pouring from the sky, all this filled his mind and spirit, and for those few hours ... he was at peace.’ The cleansing properties of fire and water resonate with other characters, too. Early in the novel, Danny falls overboard in a boating accident. He allows his family to believe he is drowned, neatly escaping the violent claustrophobia of life with his alcoholic father. He is reborn, free to live as he pleases.

The River Baptists is an assured novel that develops an admirable complexity of character and theme. Castles is undaunted by the mechanical demands of a narrative built around psychological tension and suspense, handling the climactic passages with restraint and skill. Her prose is plain, lean and unselfconsciously sinuous, indicating a writer with a knack for stylistic control. I look forward to seeing what she does next.