The Backwater
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The Kelly family has always been trouble
When a fire in a remote trailer park community kills nine people, including 17-year-old Sabine Kelly's mother and sister, Sabine confesses to the murders. Shortly after, she escapes custody, flees her broken hometown, and disappears into the thick forest and winding backwaters of her childhood refuge, the river.
Recently let go from marriage, motherhood and her career, journalist Rachel Weidermann has long suspected Sabine made her way back to the river—and now, twelve years after the "Trailer Park Murders," she has the time and the tenacity to corner a fugitive and land the story of the year, hoping the success would allow her to stitch back together the ragged edges of her life. But Rachel's ambition lights the fuse leading to a brutal chain of events, and the web Sabine weaves will force Rachel to question everything she believes.
As forceful and unrelenting as the river that drives its story, The Backwater is a stunning, suspenseful novel about class, corruption, truth, and justice by a powerful new voice in crime fiction.
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Some Things Are Just Universal. In all honesty, reading this book as a former trailer park kid in the southeastern US (I grew up in exurban Atlanta, on the border between Atlanta and Appalachia), I couldn't ever really tell that it was set in Australia other than occasionally weird terms like paracetamol for Tylenol, and I'm now assuming that what this text calls a "tilly" is what we would call in the Southern US a "john boat".
But seriously, with this tale of a now young woman still on the run and the life that she has created hiding out along the backwaters after being accused of a devastating crime and the local corrupt cops seeking her... yeah, this is one that reads pretty damn universally, at least to those of certain backgrounds.
Wakefield does an excellent job with both characterization and pacing here, constantly dangling the secrets to get the reader to stay invested until finally the explosive playoff that by that point reads like some of Christopher Swann's finest works - which is high praise indeed, given that his books are quite awesome. (Also that he, too, lives in the Atlanta area and several of his books are set there among Atlanta's poorer underbelly as well.)
For those looking for a fairly action packed, cat and mouse kind of game that very much bleeds into the psychological, this really is quite a remarkable book. For those looking to be exposed to a side of life that they are fortunate enough to have never been anywhere near, again, this is a very well done tale showing some of the worse realities of life near the very bottom of the socioeconomic scale - particularly when you refuse government "assistance". And for those who have lived that life and too close to it for comfort... this is one of those rare indeed tales where *our* voices get to be heard in particularly strong and emotional ways.
Truly a complex tale that works at every level.
Very much recommended.
Originally posted at bookanon.com.