Every Lake by Adam Perry

Adam Perry’s debut thriller takes a classic ‘return to the scene of the crime’ setup and drops it into a postcard-perfect Otago lake town with an undertow: Tall Pines is split between working-class locals who live there all year and wealthy holiday homeowners.

When Alice was fifteen, her father, Jon, allegedly killed her friend Mia in their lakefront cottage then disappeared into the surrounding bush. More than a decade later, Alice is back in Tall Pines (jobless and mid-divorce) to sell the boarded-up ‘murder house.’ The problem is she can’t move on until she understands what really happened that night. When Mia’s death is linked to another unsolved murder, Alice starts to see a pattern and is determined to finally clear her family name.

The push-pull, between needing closure and fearing it, drives the novel forward.

Adam expertly builds the tension of a small town that remembers everything, except the parts it prefers to forget. The book’s best suspense comes not from jump scares, but from watching Alice realise the story she grew up with has been curated by people with reputations to protect, property values to maintain and long-practised alibis. The novel plays with the slasher-movie vibe of an isolated lake house and the long-held rumour that Jon may still be out there. But it’s the human danger and what people will do to keep secrets buried that lands hardest. “Ever since reading my first Famous Five mystery, I’ve wanted to be a writer. The characters, the twists, the ginger beer. What’s not to love?” says Adam. “The idea behind Every Lake was to write a razor sharp thriller, with a lakeside ‘scary movie’ backdrop. It’s a tale of creaking pines, roaring bonfires and deep secrets, with a darkly funny heroine who is desperate to find out the truth.” 

“I was thinking about scary stories told around a bonfire; the axe murderer stalking a campground, the serial killer picking up a hitchhiker on a rainy night… But then I thought, what if you knew the person lurking in the woods? What if someone you cared about was the  scary bonfire story, the reason not to be alone in the trees after dark. How would you defend them? How would you find out the truth?”

Verdict: a gripping thriller, where everyone is a suspect, right until the end. 

Book club reading notes are available here.

Reviewer: Andrea Molloy

Allen & Unwin