The Spiral by Iain Ryan

Echo, $29.99 pb, 336 pp

Iain Ryan’s first two crime noir novels, the wonderfully evocative Four Days (2015) and the gritty one-off The Student (2016), were both shortlisted for Ned Kelly Awards. Ryan combines a deep understanding of the genre with a razor-sharp literary style heightened by dark poetic imagery and a keen ear for Australian idiom. The Spiral is no different in this respect, except perhaps for the amplification that brings a fierce narrative drive to the story, focused on Erma Bridges, the tough-minded academic protagonist and specialist in the literary field of ‘choose your own adventure’ novels.

When her under-performing research assistant Jenny Wasserman attempts to murder Erma before shooting herself, Erma must not only rebuild her life from the ground up, learning the martial art Muay Thai to help deal with her physical and mental trauma, but has to trace Wasserman’s last movements in order to recover some important research materials. Erma returns to the academy, where several women have gone missing and where she is still under investigation for allegedly conducting inappropriate relationships. Existing on an emotional edge sharpened by her recent experience and a childhood marked by difficult family relationships, Erma begins to dream from the perspective of the fantasy-character, Sero, a warrior whose search for meaning begins to parallel Erma’s. It is here that the novel takes a metaturn, with the choose-your-own adventure structure describing Sero’s journeys across a violent land coinciding with Erma’s final realisation of an interview with the elusive Archibald Moder, one that will allow her to complete her research and potentially understand Wasserman’s state of mind prior to her suicide. The Spiral is brilliantly written; like Ryan’s earlier work, it is also highly original.

Ash Mountain by Helen Fitzgerald

Affirm Press, $29.99 pb, 288 pp

Prolific and acclaimed Glasgow-based Australian writer Helen Fitzgerald has always been hard to pin down with a convenient genre or sub-genre descriptor, excepting her own description of her work as ‘domestic noir’, encompassing both dark humour and matter-of-fact representations of violence and social issues. Ash Mountain is Fitzgerald’s second novel to be set in Australia, following The Cry (2013), which was set in Australia and Scotland. The eponymous town-setting of the novel encompasses a semi-rural Victorian location not far from Melbourne, and whose name ominously has its origins in an earlier bushfire. This is telling, because the novel is framed around the ten days prior to what appears to be a cataclysmic fire. The narrative moves back and forth from present-day descriptions of the fire’s progress and the confusion wrought as family and friends are scattered in the confusion, to the perspectives of the various key of the principal characters.

The family in question largely belongs to Fran, who, with her adult son Dante and teenage daughter, Vonny has returned to town to care for her incapacitated father. The description of the family dynamics are pointed and humorous; characteristic of Fitzgerald’s novels, each protagonist is fully realised. This is important in a narrative where a fire is threatening to wipe out the town’s inhabitants: we need to feel invested, we need to care about each of them. Fran’s taking of her father out into the world by way of an iPad mounted on a stick in a pram is hilarious and typical of Fran’s attitude to life. That Fran was pregnant at the same age as her daughter due to the callous selfishness of ‘The Boarder’, the boy-now-man who happens to be visiting the town during the bushfire, leaving Fran with a son to care for and a notorious reputation to endure, is a key part of the novel’s development. The main institution in town is the Catholic boy’s school, with its boarding house and rumours of sexual abuse. Everywhere Fran looks, her personal history and that of her family are present, despite her best attempts to create a new life. As the fire begins to blast its way across the town, endangering everyone Fran loves and knows, its flames threaten to not only destroy Ash Mountain but also to reveal its long-held secrets.

Shelter by Catherine Jinks

Text Publishing, $32.99 pb, 336 pp

Following on from her terrific convict-era novel, Shepherd (2019), Shelter, the new novel by Catherine Jinks, is a propulsive thriller that is also distinctive in its plot, vision, and style. Jinks has a painterly eye: her images, even in a pared-back thriller, are always arresting and acute. Shelter begins with an atmosphere of hard-wired tension and dread that never relents, dropping the reader into a remote rendezvous between Meg and Nerine, a mother on the run from her abusive husband, together with Nerine’s two daughters, Colette and Ana. Meg is new to the network that protects victims of domestic violence, but she has made ample preparations on her rural block. She has kitted out the place with toys and other comforts to alleviate the children’s misery – a farm-stay hiatus complete with bush to roam in and chickens to feed. Meg knows what abuse feels like following her long marriage to Keith, a domineering narcissist who remains in the picture now that Meg is close to securing a small inheritance from Keith’s mother.

Nerine is grateful for the refuge that Meg offers, but she is hard to like. She lives in fear of her former partner Duncan, and she doesn’t spare her daughters from sharing her furious anxiety. As might be expected, she is very much on the edge, but also demanding and volatile. This puts Meg in a difficult position, as a willing Good Samaritan with a particular interest in caring for the daughters, and as a person with her own significant problems. The plot that develops out of this troubling dynamic is masterfully developed as it explores important themes of intergenerational damage and toxic personalities, even as it surprises and shocks.