A Child's Book of True Crime
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In a small town near Port Arthur in Tasmania in the mid-nineties, Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father of her most gifted student.
As the young teacher's sexual life is awakened by the father in scenes of escalating eroticism, the guilt she feels towards the son is compounded. Meanwhile, Veronica, her lover's wife, has just published Murder At Black Swan Point, a true crime book about the brutal slaying of a young adulteress some years before, set in a nearby town. Kate becomes fixated on the unsolved crime of passion that occured years earlier, less and less aware of her own reputation in the present.
Is it her imagination, or is someone stalking her? Is she caught playing a game where she no longer knows the rules? Has her obsession with the crime aligned her fate with that of the murdered adulteress?
Chilling, erotic and rivetingly suspenseful, A Child's Book Of True Crime marks the arrival of a powerful and startlingly original new voice.
'People don't make this kind of fuss for nothing. Hooper's novel is extraordinary...there's a confidence and imagination in the writing that you rarely see in a first novel.' Kerryn Goldsworthy, THE AUSTRALIAN
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From a young Australian comes this darkly comic debut starring Kate Byrne, a 22-year-old fourth-grade teacher at Endport Primary in Tasmania. One of Kate's favorite students is Lucien Marne, whose precociousness and premature cynicism make him an outsider in class. He greatly resembles his father, Thomas, a well-to-do lawyer with whom Kate is having a passionate affair. After Thomas's urbane wife, Veronica, publishes a creepy children's book, Murder at Black Swan Point, strange things begin to happen to Kate. In her book, Veronica inserts cute Australian animal characters into a gruesome plot based on a real-life crime: teenager Eleanor Siddell worked as an assistant to veterinarian Graeme Harvey; the older man seduced Eleanor, who easily succumbed to his charms. Allegedly, when Graeme's wife discovered their secret trysts, she murdered the girl and disappeared, leaving her abandoned car atop Suicide Cliffs. Now, in the wake of increasingly disturbing events the failure of her car's brakes, Lucien's violent drawings Kate suspects that perhaps Veronica wrote the book as a warning, or maybe even a plan of action. Kate's paranoia leads her to distrust everyone, including herself. The writing, though frequently excellent, is compromised by the book's overall feeling of disorganization. Kate displays a level of sophistication unlikely for a 22-year-old who's just striking out on her own she tosses off such observations as "perhaps all perversity comes gift-wrapped, so to speak, in the banal" and far too many pages are devoted to her musings on Eleanor's murder. Hooper's wicked, sexy tale nevertheless proves she is a writer of great promise. 6-city author tour.
