These two new crime thrillers from Australian writers Anna Downes and Lisa Kenway bring fresh takes to the genre.

Writers groups are an increasingly popular way for new and established novelists to workshop and complete their manuscripts. It’s always been difficult for new writers to get much feedback from publishers – something that a number of houses have tried to address with competitions for new/emerging writers – but writers groups can offer aspiring novelists who otherwise fall through the cracks an affordable and constructive alternative. The groups not only offer their members feedback and support but can also provide pooled social media and industry contacts. So while it’s not uncommon to see an author thanking their writers group on their book’s acknowledgements page, what is unusual is for two members of the same writers group to be published within six months of each other, which is the case with Anna Downes’ third novel Red River Road and Lisa Kenway’s debut All You Took From Me, and to participate in each other’s promotional events, as happened when Anna Downes compered Lisa Kenway’s reading at Bookface, the writers’ local bookshop on the Central Coast of New South Wales.

Red River Road combines elements of the psychological thriller with the female-buddy road novel to produce a polished, fast-paced mystery. The novel employs multiple points of view and intercuts passages of prose with social media posts. In addition, the novel’s central premise allows Downes to channel her skills as an actor (her first career – she appeared in TV and theatre in the UK) onto the page. The result is a novel that marries two contemporary fascinations into a compelling story: television streaming and social media content. While the novel is written in a highly visual way, as if waiting for its Netflix limited series, it opens with an upbeat blog penned by a beautiful, bubbly, bikini-clad ‘vanlife’ influencer named Phoebe.

A kind of Thelma and Louise updated for the Millennial and post-Millennial generations, Anna Downes has said that Red River Road was inspired by the popular lockdown fantasy of buying a van and going bush to escape the pandemic, and Phoebe embodies this fantasy for her social media fans.

However, the two central characters are Lily and Katy. Of the two, Lily most closely resembles the Thelma character, a desperate young woman on the run and living outside the law, while Katy, a law-abiding teacher, is on a compassionate mission to find her sister, the now-missing Phoebe, whose Hiace she has inherited. Phoebe’s disappearance provides the central dramatic irony in the novel, as in her role as vanlifer/influencer she is a self-proclaimed expert on female travel and her blog acts like an information hub for travellers’ safety tips – especially safety tips for solo female travellers.

In the sense that Phoebe advises her blog readers to set aside their fears and succumb to the freedom and adventure promised by solo travel – provided one follows a few basic common-sense safety tips – the romance of solo van life is worth the risk. Phoebe, for all her contemporary gloss, is a traditionally naïve heroine.

Some of Downes’ descriptions of nature make for beautifully crafted lyricism, carefully blending truncated sentences, alliteration, similes and onomatopoeia.

I become aware of soft sounds hovering in the air like dragonflies. Bugs, leaves, breeze, frogs. Human sounds too. Breath huff, sole slap, stone skitter.

While Katy’s voice is convincingly drawn, Phoebe is the most charismatic of the novel’s four narrators, though her mixture of sex appeal, confidence and rude health falls short of the sort of uber-charismatic narrator that helped catapult the psychological novel to fame, such as Amy’s voice in Gone Girl, which has an additional level of linguistic dexterity and quirkiness.

Like certain other recent protagonists in the psychological thriller genre – Glenna Thomson’s Eliza in Gone is a good example – Katy departs from the classic bad-girl anti-heroine in Red River Road. While Katy is an unreliable narrator, she is a desperately good and politically correct young woman. Similarly, while Lily is more of a tearaway, she is only a circumstantial bad girl, and deep down she is every bit as well-intentioned as Katy.

This means most of the nasty violent stuff that drives Downes’ story originates with the male characters. (Parents comprise the other bad guys.) Classic, more conventional psychological thrillers tend to depict anti-heroine protagonists, such as Sarah Bailey’s seriously flawed Oli in The Housemate, though few achieve the sociopathic stature of Gone Girl’s Amy or are as bad as their male counterparts (Ripley in Highsmith’s classic being a kind of benchmark). Downes’ characterisation seems to have less to do with the pressure on authors to produce likeable female protagonists in an increasingly tight market and more with making an admirable attempt to change the dominant crime narrative. Red River Road is a conventionally feminist novel that foregrounds action intended to change the way women are depicted in thrillers from victims to victim-survivors, creating a contemporary vision of female empowerment in the face of increasing waves of male violence.

Fellow writers group member Lisa Kenway’s All You Took From Me is a quirky debut that is part psychological thriller, part medical thriller, written in a pared-back commercial style that is peppered with Australian colloquialisms and slang.

Putting a medieval spin on the conventional Fight Club narrative with a bunch of armour-clad weekend warriors, Kenway’s novel delves into the world of gang-related crime and is set in the Blue Mountains and Sydney. When anaesthetist Clare and her husband are injured – him terminally – in a car crash on their way home from a bout at the fight club, Clare loses her memory and resorts to various techniques, some legal, some illegal, in an attempt to work out what happened. At the same time, she is being stalked and threatened by another member of the club and it’s this pressure, plus the danger Clare finds herself in, that drives most of the action. In a similar vein to Downes’ Katy and Lily, Kenway’s Clare isn’t quite the sort of outright anti-heroine you might expect in a psychological thriller: even as she breaks the law, her heart remains in the right place.

While one recent critic speculated whether or not TV streaming had killed the thriller, these novels add fresh takes to established genres, employing interesting combinations and twists to invigorate familiar tropes.

Anna Downes Red River Road Affirm Press 2024 PB 384pp $34.99

Lisa Kenway All You Took From Me Transit Lounge 2024 PB 336pp $32.99

Justine Ettler is the author of three novels and has a PhD in English from the University of Sydney. She also reviewed Chuck Palahnuik’s Fight Club for The Australian.

You can buy Red River Road from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can buy All You Took From Me from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if these books are available from Newtown Library.

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