KARINA KILMORE Where the Truth Lies. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm

Shortlisted for the Unpublished Manuscript Award in the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Karina Kilmore’s debut has got a lot of Australian crime fiction fans talking.

She was slipping away. The further she fell, the closer the clouds seemed to come. Wispy transparent slipstreams of white. Cirrus. Pain smashed her head. Floating. Her life snapped as her body folded in two. But still she hung in the big city sky, like a seagull in an updraft. She could smell the harbour, feel the winter sun, the pain began to ease. Going home. Hands lifting her. False hands. Falling again, down through metal and men and power, to regret.

This prologue is a surprisingly gentle, lyrical way to introduce a story that is gritty and dark and built around a flawed, complex character. Chrissie O’Brian is a journalist working for The Argus. A New Zealander recently arrived to take up a new job in Melbourne, she’s walked into a series of pitfalls and difficulties as complicated, and in some ways as painful, as those she left behind.

While characterisation is going to be the thing most readers will take away from the book, there’s a great sense of place here as well, with the city’s wharves and inner suburbs sketched out beautifully as O’Brian moves through her daily round from work to home.

There’s even the mandatory observation of Melbourne’s weather:

It looked like a warm late winter day but she had learned to over-prepare in Melbourne. A hot morning could have you shivering by midday. A winter’s day could quickly turn on a stifling afternoon.

All the way through the novel, it’s obvious that O’Brian is trying to come to terms with something in her past; her  drinking is causing more pain, and now professional complications:

Now, instead of a workout, she pushed open the wooden door of the old corner pub with its dark green painted facade and small high windows. Built in the era when drinking was secret men’s business. She had become a semi-regular, enough for most of the old people inside to know she drank to forget. She sensed they kept a watch and worry over her, she felt their sideways glances and turned heads when she left. But she never looked back.

The past is just one of the things she has to deal with. Many of her new colleagues resent her arrival in a newsroom struggling with redundancies and cost-cutting measures, and her life as an investigative journalist is curtailed by Harry, the overbearing newsroom boss.

Shouting and swearing was normal in newsrooms. Tension was always high, more so in recent years with all the cutbacks. People had to cope with 24-hour rolling deadlines, tweet quotas, Facebook posts, guest radio spots, video broadcasts, podcasts, digital publishing and then still meet the major print deadlines each night for the morning paper. But Harry was the loudest bully that Chrissie had worked with. Despite this, she knew most of the staff gave him leeway. They had known him in better times.

The authentic feel to this story has to come from the author’s 25 years’ experience as a newspaper journalist. The authority with which she relates the difficulties in chasing down tenuous links to a story, the way tensions build within the newsroom, and the interactions with senior and junior staff, is vivid. You can feel the effect all this shouting, pressure and worry is having on everyone, from Harry through to O’Brian’s colleagues, and out into the field.

It happened like this every time. The cost cutting throughout the media industry had been relentless for more than a decade. The stress built before each announcement, like the build-up before a monsoon. When the names and numbers were finally known, the worst was over. Relief for most.

Despite being sidelined into obituary writing, O’Brian finds ways to continue the investigation at the heart of this story into waterfront tensions, the outline of which may ring some bells for Victorians in particular. A face-off between unions and big business has been bubbling away, and O’Brian has been working her way into a story she believes has the potential to put her name on the front pages. But with the death of the female dockworker who tried to warn her there was something sinister going on, she ends up chasing the story of an accident she’s convinced was murder. Interwoven with the wharf investigation is personal jeopardy, and a lot more detail about what sent her running from New Zealand in the first place:

Chrissie’s mouth twisted, her eyes slipped behind a wall of tears. Everything she had fought against was beating her. A lung-emptying sob surged out of her mouth. She tried to bury her face but she was laid bare. A rattle sounded as she sucked in air, followed by another louder sob. Her distress spread around the room and crawled into the hallway.

However, it’s not all emotional angst in Where the Truth Lies. There is also brutality in the form of animal harm. It’s not gratuitous, and is conducted off-stage, but has an impact on the characters involved. Tension comes from a number of directions at once, with the fates of friends and colleagues under threat, whether from work pressures or whatever lies at the heart of the waterfront.

Female protagonists with drinking, drug and personal problems have always been something of a rarity for local crime writers, but many in the past have been strong, thoughtful characterisations full of failings, sometimes racked with angst, sometimes unrepentant. (Annie Hauxwell’s brilliant Catherine Berlin and Leah Giarratano’s searing Jill Jackson series come to mind here.) It’s easy to imagine Chrissie O’Brian joining this select group. She’s not a character designed to be liked; this is a woman who has made mistakes and is rebuilding her life as a result. It’s difficult to not feel some sympathy for the pain that rebuilding can cause.

Often when an ‘amateur’ detective is introduced, there can be a bit of credibility-stretching required to get them into enough crime scenarios to keep them investigating. Where the Truth Lies sets up a really strong potential series character, flawed but possessing enough self-reliance and self-will to make her believable, and with a realistic reason for being at the centre of mayhem. It’s easy to see why everyone’s talking about this debut novel.

Karina Kilmore Where the Truth Lies Simon & Schuster 2020 352pp PB $29.99

Karen Chisholm blogs from austcrimefiction.org, where she posts book reviews as well as author biographies.

You can buy Where the Truth Lies from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here.

To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.

Tags: Australian crime fiction, Australian women writers, female investigators, Karina | Kilmore, Melbourne waterfront