For All the Dead Girls by Sherryl Clark

The redoubtable private investigator Louisa Alcott is back for a second outing in For All the Dead Girls, with the fire in her belly undiminished since the events of Sherryl Clark’s excellent 2024 thriller Woman, Missing, which meticulously explored the risks posed to women by the expanding digital ecosystem. Of course, technology has made leaps since, and a primary theme of this new novel is just how trackable, and vulnerable, we all are, and triply so if we’re female or very young.

That storyline kicks off when Lou is dispatched into country Victoria to perform what’s known as an “extraction” – the rescue, in this instance, of a terrified mother and son from their home while their abuser is out. If the technical precision of that word makes you think of Navy SEALs rappelling into a hot zone to retrieve an under-fire buddy, Lou’s escapade is about as tense and dangerous.

The woman, Jasmine, has tried to leave twice before but been found by her husband, and the women’s refuge where she previously fled was destroyed in a fire. Suspiciously, only minutes after Lou arrives at the home, the husband is on his way back in his conspicuous white ute, as if he somehow knew his family was about to flee. Only Lou’s sharp instincts and an alert ally in the neighbourhood ensure a successful escape.

Any sense of relief is short-lived. Jasmine is tired and resigned, certain she will never be free, and Lou starts to think the same way when she pulls up at the outer Melbourne safe house where she is supposed to deposit the two and finds the bullet-strewn bodies of two women – one a new survivor, and the other a longtime caretaker of people leaving abusive relationships.

It’s an horrific scene, and as the investigation unfolds, Lou and Paul Marshall, her boss, start to tease out a trend: the use of digital tracking devices, like spying apps on phones, and underground web networks through which men communicate and conspire. In doing so, they quickly understand just what men who hate women are prepared to do to their targets, and how hard it is to stop them once you’re in their sights.

Lou is a terrific investigator endowed with both hard and soft skills; she is what’s known as a ‘super-recogniser’ who can pick out a suspect just from dating app photos, and she has a high EQ to go with it, but her ability to acutely read people and situations starts to count for less when what’s promised as a secure refuge is set ablaze by a Molotov cocktail.

Wisely, Clark cuts the acidity of this plotline with a less violent but even more mysterious matter involving a man with the deliberately anodyne, assumed name of John Brown, who with his brother is the named inheritor of several hundred thousand pounds from a Scottish uncle.

The brother, a shocked Louisa learns, is her own grandfather, Hamish Campbell, a prominent Melbourne crime boss who has been involved in violent episodes in the past but who now insists to Lou that all his businesses, including a shadowy relationship with a property developer, are on the up-and-up.

Lou’s investigation brings her closer to her family history and to some kind of accord with the people, including her parents, who fell short, and helps her understand what informed the choices Hamish has made. The real warmth of her relationship with her grandfather, along with her other personal and professional connections, raise the stakes for the reader – Lou has great ‘normal person’ bona fides as a protagonist; she reads as someone you could have a coffee with – as she plunges further into peril, the scale of which even she can’t see coming.

For All the Dead Girls is dedicated to the French rape survivor Gisèle Pelicot, who became a global emblem of courage for forgoing her anonymity and insisting that the shame of sexual violence must be held only by those who perpetrate it. And the novel seems to me fuelled by a rage that is cold and white-hot at the same time; rage at the needless suffering of women and children at the hands of men who choose violence over every other better option, who would rather kill or wound another creature than care for it or simply leave it alone.

And to what end? Clark seems to ask. It’s all frighteningly timely, with so many active cases of non-stranger homicides and gender-based violence being reported in New Zealand and Australia, and then there’s the inescapable Cornell 7, another emblem of something much bigger and more malevolent than our culture seems to have the power or will to face down.

Reviewer: Stephanie Jones

HarperCollins