Shelley Burr

Murder Town' is a good thriller with a decent mystery at its heart. It's filled with old secrets and present-day lies. It's set in a small town that has suffered a steady decline in the fifteen years since the murders, blighting the lives of the remaining locals while also seeming to offer them their only path to survival. The suspect pool is small but interesting. Best of all, although the man convicted of the killings is in jail, another murder is committed in the same style at a time when most of the townsfolk are gathered together.

The story is told mostly from the point of view of Gemma Guillory, a lifelong resident of the town, who has a personal connection to the killings (the final victim died in her arms when she was nineteen), is (unhappily) married to a local police detective, has secrets of her own and is just starting to discover that she knows much less about her neighbours than she thought she did. As she tries to figure out who did the latest killings she has to rethink her relationship with everyone around her and re-evaluate what really happened fifteen years earlier.

I liked Gemma Guilory and I became engaged in her search for the truth, especially as it started to put her safety at risk.

If I'd read 'Murder Town' without having read the first P I Lane Holland book, 'Wake' first, I'd probably have settled in and enjoyed myself.

Unfortunately, I bought 'Murder Town' with the hope that it would follow a similar path to 'Wake' and deliver a similar emotional punch. It had a similar structure but a lesser emotional impact.

'Wake' was not so much a mystery novel as a story about two survivors of a trauma whose lives have been twisted out of shape in different ways by the unanswered questions surrounding the disappearance of a little girl from a sheep farm nineteen years earlier. What I liked most about it was that it was a slow-burn story where the plot twists weren’t built to shock or surprise but to deepen the reader’s engagement with the characters.

'Wake' was not so much a mystery novel as a story about two survivors of a trauma whose lives have been twisted out of shape in different ways by the unanswered questions surrounding the disappearance of a little girl from a sheep farm nineteen years earlier. What I liked most about it was that it was a slow-burn story where the plot twists weren’t built to shock or surprise but to deepen the reader’s engagement with the characters.

'Murder Town' is much more plot-driven and while the twists and surprises add tension and excitement, they're not character-driven.

Like 'Wake', the present-day events are driven by traumatic killings that took place fifteen years earlier and the story is told from two points of view, Gemma Guillory and Lane Holland. The biggest difference is that there is no connection and almost no interaction between Guillory and Holland and Holland's involvement required a significant suspension of disbelief.

In 'Murder Town' Lane Holland is in prison, serving time after being convicted of murder as a result of the events at the end of 'Wake'. This made sense. Where else would he be? What I struggled with were the plot gymnastics necessary to get him involved in this story at all.

Shelley Burr solved the problem by having Holland share a cell with the man convicted of the three killings fifteen years earlier and by giving the prison governor a personal agenda.

The upside of this approach was that I got an up close and personal view of the convicted killer and Holland's investigation gave me access to information and perspectives that Gemma Guillory didn't have. The downside was that Holland felt more like a plot device than a character and I found myself wondering if the novel might have worked better without him.… (plus d'informations)

Rainier is a small town isolated off the highway between Sydney and Melbourne. Once a charming place to live, Rainier is now haunted by its reputation as the home of the Rainier Ripper, a serial killer. Now a company wants to run visitor tours to the murder town, this splits the residents. Their complex relationships and history are all linked to the original crimes. Meanwhile the convicted killer is on the brink of death, will he carry his secrets to the grave?
There is a really great idea here, that of the true crime obsession in society. However I felt there were too many good ideas in this story which tended to blur the narrative making it hard to follow.… (plus d'informations)

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.… (plus d'informations)

'Wake' is not so much a mystery novel as a story about two survivors of a trauma whose lives have been twisted out of shape in different ways by the unanswered questions surrounding the disappearance of a little girl from a sheep farm nineteen years earlier.

It's a slow-burn story where the plot twists aren't built to shock or surprise but to deepen the reader's engagement with the characters.

The sheepfarm and the small town near to it are more than a setting for the story, they are almost characters in their own right, both shaping and reflecting the experience of the main characters. To my Brit eyes, the huge scale of the sheepfarm and its taken-for-granted isolation were startling, The farm, once bustling but now destocked, ravaged by years of drought and now run by a skeleton crew who do little more than maintenance, was a physical manifestation of what had happened to the life of Mina, the twin sister who wasn't taken, after her sister's disappearance.

The story has the framework of a mystery, with Lane Holland, a Private Investigator, coming to Mina McCreary's farm to try and solve a notorious decades-old cold case. Except Mina doesn't want him there and he has an agenda that goes way beyond solving the case to get the substantial reward money.

Lane and Mina both start as enigmatic figures with pasts that have left them scarred and which still hold their present ransom. What those pasts were and if or how they were linked is what most of the story is about.

Although this is a story about a cold case, it doesn't feel like a solve-the-puzzle mystery of like a dramatised True Crime. It felt more like real life, where things are never neat and tidy, misunderstandings are common and things never quite turn out the way you thought they would.

There's a lot in the book about how parents influence children, the unreliability of memory, the parasitical nature of social media keyboard warriors who turn personal tragedies into public myths and the persistence of grief and guilt.

At the heart of it are two damaged people who need to find a way of looking forward and not backwards.

'Wake' is the start of a series of books featuring PI Lane Holland. I've pre-ordered the next book, 'Murder Town' (a.k.a 'Ripper') which is scheduled for release as an audiobook on 28th December 2023.

I recommend the audiobook version of 'Wake' narrated by Jacquie Brennan. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.

https://soundcloud.com/hodderbooks/wake-by-shelley-burr-read-by-jacquie-brennan-...… (plus d'informations)