Review: RIPPER, Shelley Burr

• 
  this edition published by Hachette Australia 2023
• supplied by my local library
  
• ISBN 978-0-7336-4785-7
• 346 pages

Synopsis (publisher)

Gemma Guillory has lived in Rainier her entire life. She knows the tiny town's ins and outs like the back of her hand, the people like they are her family, their quirks as if they were her own.

She knows her once-charming town is now remembered for one reason, and one reason only. That three innocent people died. That the last stop on the Rainier Ripper's trail of death seventeen years ago was her innocuous little teashop. She knows that the consequences of catching the Ripper still haunt her police officer husband and their marriage to this day and that some of her neighbours are desperate - desperate enough to welcome a dark tourism company keen to cash in on Rainier's reputation as the murder town.

When the tour operator is killed by a Ripper copycat on Gemma's doorstep, the unease that has lurked quietly in the original killer's wake turns to foreboding, and she's drawn into the investigation. Unbeknownst to her, so is a prisoner named Lane Holland. Gemma knows her town. She knows her people. Doesn't she?

My Take

The outback town of Rainer has been dying for 17 years, ever since a killer, nicknamed The Ripper, put it on the map by murdering 3 of its residents. Since then the highway has by-passed the town and businesses have dwindled. Gemma is in an uneasy marriage with one of the town's policemen, and is the mother of a teenage daughter.

Now a tourism operator has held out a helping hand and is offering to run a macabre tour based on the events 17 years ago. The families affected are meeting together to agree to the tour. But while they are talking, the tourism operator himself is murdered, his body left in the fountain where the first murder took place.

There are lots of little twists in the plot as Gemma tries to find out who has committed the murder. The reader has a lot to do in working out the little secrets, who is married to who, whose children are whose and so on, but I found the narrative disjointed. The problem was exacerbated by the addition of external plot strands, particularly the decision to interview the original Ripper.

My rating: 4.5 

I've also read 4.8, WAKE

Review: WAKE, Shelley Burr

• 
   this edition published by Hachette Australia 2022
  
• 363 pages
• ISBN 9-780733-647826
• winner CWA Debut Dagger 2019
• WINNER OF THE DEBUT CRIME ACWA NED KELLY AWARD 2023
  

Synopsis (publisher)

A Top Ten bestseller, WAKE is a searing debut crime novel where the grief and guilt surrounding an unsolved disappearance still haunt a small farming community . . . and will ultimately lead to a reckoning.

Evelyn simply vanished.

The small town of Nannine lies in the harsh red interior of New South Wales. Once a thriving outback centre, this ghost town now has one sinister claim to fame: the still-unsolved disappearance of Evelyn McCreery nineteen years ago from the bedroom she shared with her twin sister.

Mina McCreery's life has been defined by the intense and ongoing public interest in her sister's case. Now a reclusive adult, Mina lives alone on her family's sunbaked, destocked sheep farm. The million-dollar reward her mother established to solve the disappearance has never been paid out.

Enter Lane Holland, a private investigator who dropped out of the police academy to earn a living cracking cold cases. Lane has his eye on the unclaimed money, but he also has darker motivations.

WAKE is a powerful, unsparing story of how trauma ripples outward when people's private tragedies become public property, and how it's never too late for the truth to set things right. 

My Take

Lane Holland, private investigator, comes to Nannine to see if he can talk to Mina McCreery about the disappearance of her twin sister nineteen years before. He has done his homework and finds her fairly easily at the general store. But she doesn't, not surprisingly, doesn't want to talk to him. Lane also tries to talk to locals, but they are as reticent as Mina. So Lane uses plan B. He investigates another missing girl, the sister of a friend of Mina's, and her he eventually has some success.

The novel carefully takes readers over what happened nineteen years earlier, and then what has happened to Mina's family since. 

On the surface Lane appears to be mainly interested in the million dollar reward that Mina's mother established in a trust fund over a decade earlier. But what he doesn't reveal is his ulterior motive, that he suspects that he already knows who was responsible for the 9 year old's disappearance.

A very atmospheric book. The Australian setting comes through strongly. Highly recommended.

My rating: 4.8 

About the author

Shelley Burr is the winner of the CWA Debut Dagger award with Wake, an alumni of the ACT Writer's Centre Hardcopy program (2018) and a Varuna fellow. When not writing she works at the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment. She lives in Canberra, but grew up splitting her time between Newcastle and Glenrowan, where her father's family are all sheep farmers. WAKE is Shelley's first novel.