Book Review: "Dirt Creek" by Hayley Scrivenor

When a young girl disappears from a small Australian town, the investigation uncovers many secrets.

I don’t know what’s in the water in Australia, but they really have some great mystery writers! I’ve seen a lot of great crime novels reviewed by my Australian Bookstafriends that don’t even get published here in the U.S., so I was excited to get my hands on this.

“We understood, even then, that bad things happened. And we understood that sometimes people made them happen. Sometimes those people were people close to us, or even ourselves.”

When 12-year-old Esther goes missing after school, her disappearance rocks the small town of Durton. Everyone seems to see everything, so did no one really see what happened to her? As the detectives dig into the events of that day and suspicions shift, they step into a web of secrets and lies that have remained hidden just below the surface.

The story is narrated by multiple people, including Esther’s best friend, who starts an investigation of her own; Sarah, the lead detective, who is trying to hold her life together following a breakup with her girlfriend; and a Greek chorus of sorts made up by the voices of local children.

This is a slow-burn mystery with a Jane Harper-esque feel to it, but it is so rich in character development. There were so many nuances I really enjoyed.

Book Review: "We Run the Tides" by Vendela Vida

We Run the Tides is a provocative, powerful coming-of-age novel and a look at the uneasy path to finding your own way.

“We are thirteen, almost fourteen, and these streets of Sea Cliff are ours. We walk these streets to our school perched high over the Pacific and we run these streets to the beaches, which are cold, windswept, full of fishermen and freaks.”

In mid-1980s San Francisco, Eulabee and her best friend, the charismatic Maria Fabiola, are on the cusp of womanhood. They and their friends attend an all-girls’ school and they know their neighborhood well, as well as the characters that inhabit the houses around them.

One day while walking to school, a man talks to Eulabee and her friends. At that moment something traumatic purportedly happens, at least according to Maria Fabiola and their two friends. But Eulabee’s insistence on adhering to what she saw rather than follow Maria Fabiola’s lead leaves her on the outside looking in, the subject of ostracism by her classmates.

Shortly thereafter, Maria Fabiola disappears. The daughter of a wealthy family, she is believed kidnapped, but Eulabee wonders what the truth is. And as she tries to make sense of being shunned by her friends, to understand her burgeoning sexuality, she finds herself caught up in the stories Maria Fabiola weaves.

This was a quirky but well-told book about the fragility of friendships, particularly among teenage girls, and the pressure to decide how much of yourself needs to change in order to fit in. The whole thing seemed a bit improbable but I remembered its 1980s setting.