River's Edge

Rating:
Summary: Female crime writers and the continuation of Aussie laconism
Review: Somehow, it doesn't quite matter how many crime novels featuring strong willed, independent, quirky-lifestyled heroines that I read, I can dig into the next one with just as keen an anticipation.

That is, as long as it is by a concise and cleanly narrating Australian author along the lines of Jan McKemmish or Finola Moorhead or Marele Day, all of whom have come up with central female characters (mainly detectives) who for the most part live fiercely independent lives.

No less crisp in her style, Cath Phillips has produced River's Edge, featuring two of these heroines, both lesbian, who come together following the disappearance of Ryan, a gay recluse resident of the river community.

Living with a pack of dogs on a carefully tended island in the middle of the river, the blue-eyed Amazonian Valentine is a combination of baker businesswoman and wild water girl.

Immediately on impact you sense the intensity of connection between herself and her counterpart, Detective Chief Inspector Jane Stewart, Commander of Homicide Northern Region, a self-declared city living solitary who in the controlled facades of her life appears to have little in common with Valentine.
Yet, she describes Valentine as a twin on their first encounter:

"I am six foot two and her eyes are level with mine (...) Blue eyes are burning out of a brown cracked face (...) I could have this woman like an addiction, a pounding, a hammering in the veins."

But Valentine's intense regard for the balance of life and nature makes her more than a straight heroine in this novel. Upon her discovering the cause for her friend Ryan's death and witnessing the remains of a neighbour drowned to a horrible death by an abusive husband, a darker side of her is revealed. She is a fuse waiting to be lit, a danger, a denial of the very structured law and order that Jane Stewart represents:

"Rage and anger. That's all I've got (...) A fever of fury (...) How can people live like this? How can they live so shallow, so narrow, so evil? (...) Action is required."

The novel belongs almost entirely to these two women and the pleasure of reading this novel is just as much obtained from the unravelling of Valentine's and Stewart's lives as by the following of the mystery of why Ryan was murdered. The alternate narratives of Stewart and Valentine are imprinted with their personalities and with the questions behind why they live the lives they do.

Part of the fascination of River's Edge lies in picking up on the complexity and vulnerabilities of the two central characters, blended with the unbending clearcut flow of the words used to describe even the most evident of motives.

"Like the steel girders and concrete slabs of an empty high-rise, will the skeleton of my self be left naked and showing for all the world to see as the sun burns and the rain freezes the emptiness of my life? (...) Why did I bother to buy two bottles when a few inches from one can dissolve me into self-pitying maudlin nonsense? Even my capacity for alcoholic self-abasement is strictly limited."

The tale is complicated by police corruption. Stewart keeps a tightly controlled lid on her interactions with competent colleagues, characterised among others by keen female local sergeant Cameron, and with surly, dirty-dealing, officers such as Coburn.

Anonymous threats to Stewart underlie the precariousness of her position as a high-ranking and lesbian female officer.

But the intrigue of the novel becomes how Stewart reacts to Valentine's evidently vigilante bent, how she deals with being a police officer in a corrupt system, whether or not she will be lured away by the freedom of life characterised by Valentine.

I began this novel lying on the grass in the Domain in Sydney in Australia in the midst of the Go Girl festivals on International Woman's Day and I was utterly absorbed.

If all Cath Phillips' novels promise to be as crisp and clean and beautifully woven as this one, I am immediately adding her to my list of brilliant female crime writers. Without denying that I am completely biased we seem to have a plethora in this country.