An Isolated Incident
Emily Maguire
An Isolated Incident
Emily Maguire
When 25-year-old Bella Michaels is brutally murdered in the small town of Strathdee, the community is stunned and a media storm descends.
Unwillingly thrust into the eye of that storm is Bella’s beloved older sister, Chris, a barmaid at the local pub, whose apparent easygoing nature conceals hard-won wisdom and the kind of street-smarts only experience can bring.
As Chris is plunged into despair and searches for answers, reasons, explanation - anything - that could make even the smallest sense of Bella’s death, her ex-husband, friends and neighbours do their best to support her. But as the days tick by with no arrest, Chris’s suspicion of those around her grows.
An Isolated Incident is a psychological thriller about everyday violence, the media’s obsession with pretty dead girls, the grip of grief and the myth of closure, and the difficulties of knowing the difference between a ghost and a memory, between a monster and a man.
Review
Alan Vaarwerk
The NSW Riverina town of Strathdee is fictional, but that doesn’t stop the setting of Emily Maguire’s fifth novel from being all too real. The storyline is familiar too, both in fiction and reality – the young and pretty Bella Michaels is abducted and brutally murdered. The narrative alternates between Bella’s sister Chris, a local barmaid, and May Norman, a Sydney crime reporter looking for a breakthrough story. As the eyes of the world turn on Strathdee, the darker undercurrents of this seemingly sleepy town are laid bare.
Maguire plays with the conventions of pretty-dead-girl crime fiction – a police investigation, a cast of suspicious characters, a shocking twist that exposes the monster under the readers’ nose – but about halfway through An Isolated Incident, it becomes clear that this isn’t that kind of novel. Instead, while the police do their work in the background, the novel focuses on Chris as she is consumed by her grief, her suspicion of those around her, and growing sense that Bella’s presence hasn’t left her entirely. It’s not a spoiler, nor a criticism, to say the novel’s ending isn’t the kind of neat, satisfying conclusion we’re used to in this genre.
Maguire’s characters are complex and compelling, particularly Chris’s ex-husband Nate, whose tender nature is at odds with his darker past. Switching between Chris’s country charm and May’s self-loathing professionalism, Maguire’s prose is concise and confident, affecting without being maudlin, horrifying without being gruesome. As Chris and May separately grapple with the media attention given to the case, the novel also offers an insight into the ethically questionable world of crime reportage, even considering the effects of marches, vigils and other kinds of well-meaning activism on those left behind. But this timely and gripping novel’s most unsettling, and enduring, undercurrent lies in the attitudes of the innocent men, the ones who aren’t killers but are happy to accept their mates’ violence as part of the small-town social order. This too is sadly familiar.
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