Now You See Me maintains an almost unbroken intensity from the first page, which is the first of a series of excerpts from the journal of a manifestly disturbed but very controlled speaker, who identifies him or herself as a killer, who admits to being subject to visits from ‘demons’ who demand sacrifices. ‘When the demons come I kill the next one. And then they go away.’

The novel proceeds in episodic bits like this, hopping from vignette to vignette from the lives of the half-dozen or so friends whose story this is. We’re located very precisely, deftly, and definitely in the present, right in medias res of the various messes they have made of things. Some of the conversations included as segments of this piecemeal aggregate are between psychiatrist and patient, or between husband and wife, or ex-wife and current wife, ex-wife and new boyfriend. Each character has several roles, or ex-roles; each is significant to the others in different ways, perhaps unsuspected by themselves.

Punctuating these present-day episodes are journal entries addressed to a ‘you’ who must be one of the group – we don’t know who – taking us each time deeper into the psyche and dreadful history of the killer, whom assorted other characters such as Sharon the cop and Noel the journalist are trying to track down. We discover that the killer knows about their efforts, and is staying one jump ahead.

The writing is smooth, pacy, and adroit, the dialogue sharp and well-judged, the exposition clever and controlled, delivering doses of information on a need-to-know basis. Now You See Me’s central proposition is that any, or perhaps almost any, of the characters whose flaws and idiosyncrasies are cunningly, incrementally disclosed, might possibly be damaged or mad enough to be responsible for the child murders, which continue to happen during the course of the narrative. Several of the friends once half-jokingly formed a group called Abused Only Kids. They begin to suspect each other. Some of them die. Importantly, each character is made to seem vulnerable enough not to appear as prime suspect. The temptation to make a monster out of an apparent fiend is skilfully sidestepped.

It is the thirty-something newcomers to the group of old friends, now in their forties, Sharon and Noel (a female Noel), less damaged than the rest, who work hardest at unravelling the mystery, but their attempts are foiled by the greater cunning of the perpetrator – yes, the perpetrator is identified, but only self­identifed, at the end. The great success of .the book is to suggest so cogently the proportion of damaged adults out there, you, me, your friends, my friends, who are holding lives of a kind together, having children of their own, keeping up social commitments, holding down jobs, who might, statistically, have been injured irreversibly enough to act out the sort of appeasement-scenario Bedford imagines.

Finally, it doesn’t matter very much to the reader whodunnit, and this, I think, is the author’s point. Her acknowledgements include Priscilla Adey of the NSW Department of Public Prosecutions, ‘who let me trail around after her...’ Gabrielle Lord’s Whipping Boy bore the evidence of serious research into paedophilia and worse. Bedford has gone a step beyond, achieving an inwardness with a group of characters constructed as psychologically capable of doing dreadful harm, but only because appalling harm has first been done to them. Not all these people are psychopaths, which is just as much her point. They have survived; they are decent, they are lovable.

By means of the sessions between psychiatrist Fran, ex-wife of Mike, and Rosa (wife of Tom, whose impotency problems have only one, bizarre solution, which he acts out with ‘Diana’, whom we suspect may be one of the other characters), and via the fragmentary and unsatisfactory discussions between various combinations of the friends and lovers, Bedford explores the murky and infinitely fascinating intricacies of what sex and friendship are all about, how limited our conventional terminology regarding these matters may be, how frail our constructs of family, fidelity, love:

Rosa can hardly take it in. ‘Mick was an abused child, too?’ ‘Well, he said he used to get beaten just about every day when he was a kid. His dad had some sort of war trauma, and his mother was a bible-basher. The others said he couldn’t be one of them because he had a sister, and they were each the only child ... Rosa nods and stays sitting at the table ... Secrets and betrayals, she thinks, wondering if Fran is right and these are merely meaningless words.

There’s a lot of sex in this novel: sex as pitiful acting-out, as manipulative or compulsive behaviour, loving and mutual, as well as terrifying and brutal sex. It’s far from dispassionately presented, but Bedford uses sexual behaviour as the crucial signifier of disturbance. The sort of sexual sadism that at first appears to be part of the killer’s psyche, for instance, turns out to be something quite different. The child-killer considers him/herself a saviour.

‘All right,’ she said, … ‘You seem to have escaped the inherited taint … But most don’t. If it’s been done to them, they’ll end up doing it to others … I sometimes think we don’t deserve to survive as a race. What other species can’t nurture its young?

Now You See Me will make you think very seriously about that proposition.