The July crime review
These are the crime books which have been read and reviewed by our excellent booksellers this month – all in one place!
Lay Your Body Down by Amy Suiter Clarke
Reviewed by Aurelia Orr from Readings Kids
Lay Your Body Down is a powerful and alluring novel about mob mentality, indoctrination, and confronting one’s demons.
Delilah vowed never to return to her hometown in Minnesota and its cult-like church, but when her ex-boyfriend, Lars, dies, Del follows her gut instinct to go home. At Lars’s funeral, Del begins to believe that his death was more sinister than she thought. To bring the truth to light, she must face Pastor Rick, the church’s enigmatic priest, whose influence and power have grown internationally through the help of Eve, Lars’s wife. Eve is the author of the blog for the ‘Noble Wife’ movement, which espouses Pastor Rick’s conservative and fundamentalist philosophy on women’s roles and on marriage.
As the writer, linguist, and podcast host Amanda Montell wrote in her 2021 book, Cultish, ‘... unlike the cults of the ’70s, we don’t even have to leave the house for a charismatic figure to take hold of us. With contemporary cults, the barrier to entry is the simple frisson of tapping Follow.’ Amid the misogyny that much of Eve’s blog comprised and promoted, there were sensible moments that expressed the desire to be loved and cared for. These moments are what makes cults so terrifying because, as Montell discusses in her book, language cannot brainwash you, but it can make you believe in something that you already, on some level, may think you want to believe, and it can send you down a rabbit hole into extremism from there.
On an important note, I do love that in Lay Your Body Down Del hasn’t lost her faith in God, despite her experience in a cult. Amy Suiter Clarke is not malicious against Christianity, but rather brings attention to how the manipulation of faith can lead to the villainisation of, and violence against, women. This novel is a gripping and nuanced examination of how there is no intrinsic evil in religion itself, the danger lies in how religion can be abused and weaponised to exert power over others.
The Nigerwife by Vanessa Walters
Reviewed by Margaret Snowdon from Readings Carlton
I picked up this book looking forward to a crime novel set in a place I know very little about: Lagos, Nigeria. ‘The Nigerwives’ referenced in the title are a support group formed by all the women who have married wealthy Nigerians and have moved to Lagos to live a life of ease and luxury – maybe. The term made me think of TV shows like The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Lagos is vastly different to LA, although there are some similarities when reading between the lines, and the wives certainly live rich and privileged lives – if materialism is the apex of your ambition.
Nicole is a young Jamaican British woman who comes from a poor and complicated family suffering the fallout of intergenerational trauma from abuse rooted in the history of colonial slavery – which nobody wants to acknowledge, let alone talk about. She marries a handsome, charming and rich (oops, already!) Nigerian man she meets at university in London while she is studying law. Nicole moves to Lagos with him after the birth of their first child.
Tonye’s family are rich thanks to Nigerian oil. They live in a protected, gated community in a society becoming increasingly fragmented, just as the lives of the protagonists also begin to fragment. This is due in some part to the impending civil unrest, but not entirely. There are conflicts around living traditional lives loaded with Western consumerism and behaviours, unresolved family tensions, and loss. The action begins when Nicole goes missing and her aunt from London hotfoots it to Lagos to find out what has happened to her estranged niece.
It is a mystery novel of sorts, with many elements swirling around the characters and their many issues. Predominant are the continuing legacies of the slave trade in and from Africa, appalling attitudes towards women across the board, and a society in great flux.
The Watchful Wife by Suzanne Leal
Reviewed by Elke Power, editor of Readings Monthly
Ellen and her husband Gordon are high school English teachers. They met while working at the school where Ellen still teaches, but not long after they are married, Gordon moves to a new school for a promotion. Everything is going well for them both until, less than a year into the new job, Gordon is accused, via an anonymous note pushed under the principal’s door, of an appalling crime.
At first, though he is suspended immediately, Ellen and Gordon do not know of what he has been accused, or by whom. Ellen cannot believe kind, gentle Gordon has done anything wrong, so why would a member of their community accuse him of anything? Why would anyone accuse another person of something they did not do? Equally disturbing to consider, as Ellen must when the details of the allegations are revealed, is whether we can ever really know, or ever truly trust, anybody.
The Watchful Wife is a tense story about lies, deception, and how people construct their identities. It opens with the early morning arrival at Ellen and Gordon’s Sydney home of detectives from the Sexual Offences and Child Abuse Unit. It then jumps back to Ellen’s strict upbringing as the only child of devout members of the Free Church of Kirkton, and follows her gradual steps towards greater freedom, with the help of a few particularly caring teachers along the way. Even before she is estranged from her parents and church by her decision to marry outside her faith, Ellen’s unusual childhood has left her rather isolated, and there is little love or warmth in her life. However, she finds both in abundance with Gordon and his mother and sister.
This year several local crime writers have delved into deeply uncomfortable questions in unsettlingly everyday environments. While We Only Want What’s Best by Carolyn Swindell examined art and consent in the world of student dancers, The Watchful Wife takes the reader into the complex ecology of Australian schools. It’s a suspenseful, layered tale of lives suddenly derailed, and of the struggle to get those lives back on track.
