Title: WILD PLACE
Author: Christian White
Publisher: Affirm Press
Read: October 2021
Expected publication: 26 October 2021
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟
Book Description:
In the summer of 1989, a local teen
goes missing from the idyllic suburb of Camp Hill in Australia. As rumours of
Satanic rituals swirl, schoolteacher Tom Witter becomes convinced he holds the
key to the disappearance. When the police won't listen, he takes matters into
his own hands with the help of the missing girl's father and a local
neighbourhood watch group.
But as dark secrets are revealed and consequences to past actions are faced,
Tom learns that the only way out of the darkness is to walk deeper into it.
Wild Place peels back the layers of suburbia, exposing what s hidden underneath
guilt, desperation, violence and attempts to answer the question: Why do good
people do bad things?
My musings:
I can rarely resist a mystery set in
a suburban neighbourhood, especially when it promises time travel back to the
eighties. It’s fun to be reminded of a reality where kids played out in
scrubland just like “the wild place” and there were no mobile phones to keep
track of your every movement, and instead of the nosy parkers on social media
there was neighbourhood watch.
When a teenage girl goes missing
from the suburb of Camp Hill, a close-knit neighbourhood that borders an area
of wild bushland called simply “Wild Place”, the whole community is thrown into
turmoil. Worried parents forbid their children to play in the bush. Emergency
neighbourhood watch meetings are being hastily arranged. And of course
suspicion falls on the one oddball in the neighbourhood, Sean, a teenage boy
who has been seen brandishing the tattoo of a pentagram and is spending most of
his time indoors listening to heavy metal music.
Like most neighbourhood mysteries,
Wild Place relies on the slow unravelling of secrets the residents of Camp hill
keep close to their hearts. Even Tom Witter, a high school teacher at the local
Christian college, is perhaps not as lily white as he pretends to be. As
residents decide to take matters into their own hands and point the finger at
the most likely culprit – in their eyes at least – things soon escalate.
I’m not sure why I didn’t love this
book more, seeing it had all the elements I usually enjoy in a slow burning
mystery: characters with secrets to hide, time travel back to the eighties and
a few twists and turns that surprised me. But somehow I found it difficult to
engage with any of the characters at an emotional level, which made this just
an ok read for me. I appreciated the author’s tongue-in-cheek humour sprinkled
through the pages and the characters’ dialogue; the many references to religion
not so much. I also thought that the satanic rituals featured only very peripherally
and could have been used much more to create the spooky atmosphere I had hoped
for. There were also too many side characters that added little to the overall
plot in the end. I remember saying very similar things about White’s first
novel THE NOWHERE CHILD, so maybe his style just doesn’t quite gel with me
(though I really enjoyed his previous book THE WIFE AND THE WIDOW). That said,
this was an easy popcorn read to devour in a couple of sittings and was
entertaining enough to keep me reading.
Summary:
WILD PLACE will appeal to readers who enjoy slower, character driven mysteries
featuring neighbourhood dynamics and a large cast of characters. Set in
Australia, it is also full of that slight tongue-in-cheek humour that
charactersises many Australian novels and allows a bit of a chuckle whilst
trying to solve the mystery. If you usually enjoy White’s writing style,
then you should definitely pick this one up for some satanic time travel to the
eighties.
Thank
you to Netgalley and Affirm Press for the free electronic copy of this novel and
for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest review.
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