On the Edge by Kate Horan

Nel is a busy city doctor when her father’s sudden death from a heart attack brings her back to the small coastal town of Carrinya, New South Wales, where she grew up. Reluctantly, at her mother’s beseeching, she agrees to stay for a few months to keep her father’s GP practice running, until it can be sold.

Nel had not been back since she left to go to university, since her last year at school, when her best friend Maddie, daughter of a prominent politician, died in suspicious circumstances. Nel was the last person to see her alive and, till now, had not been able to return, unable to face the gossip and the stares.  Settling in to her childhood bedroom and supporting her widowed mother as well as ministering to her father’s patients, Nel meets up with a host of townspeople from the past, including Jimmy, an old classmate and now the local detective and Ryan, Maddie’s boyfriend till shortly before she died and now a real estate agent.

When she becomes aware that Ryan is not the loving husband and father and upright citizen he seems, and Sophie, his wife,  is the victim of domestic abuse, Nel finds herself being drawn to investigate the disappearance of Maddie, late at night on a coastal clifftop and the discovery of her drowned body several days later.

Nel’s search to find out what happened to Maddie and Sophie’s situation, her fear, and her desperation to break free create two threads, past and present, in the story, and the tension is well balanced between the two. The mystery of Maddie’s disappearance is gripping, with the suspect characters plausible yet unknowable, allowing plenty of guessing.  And the difficulties of Sophie’s struggle to escape her coercive and violent marriage are deftly drawn, from her own and from Nel’s perspective, and so the reader not only looks back to explain the past but also forward to future possibilities.   The people of Carrinya seem ordinary enough, most having lived there most of their lives, but as Nel comes to know them as an adult, she discovers that many of them, including her own family, carry hidden secrets. Nel has to address her relationship with her sister, who stayed in town while Nel was away, get to know her teenage niece, and Sophie tries to keep herself safe while also finding a way to protect her young children growing up in a toxic environment.

This is a thought-provoking look at teenage relationships,  friendship,  domestic abuse and the secrets and lies that families hide behind small town respectability. And while it is highly recommended as a psychological drama, it is also a gripping mystery.  A winning and very readable combination.

Reviewer: Clare Lyon

HQ Fiction