SHORTLISTED FOR NED KELLY AWARD FOR DEBUT CRIME FICTION

How far would you go to chase the ghosts of the past?

Alice Montgomery goes missing in 2015.

Seven years later, her best friend Hannah is bouncing from job to job, city to city, forever feeling the need to outrun something, but unsure what. With the niggling need to move nipping at her heels, Hannah decides to return home – a small coastal town in Western Australia – for the first time since she left, to help her mum after surgery and confront their fractured relationship.

When Hannah hears that Marnie Montgomery, Alice’s mum, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, she is seized by terror that she will never know the truth of her friend’s disappearance; whether she ran away, or met a different, darker fate. Hannah begins to ask questions, starting with Marnie, an addict and recluse, who has long been dogged by rumours that she was in some way responsible.

Insisting she had nothing to do with it, Marnie instead points the finger at a local teacher, Rachel Olney, haunted by broken dreams and the consequences of a single bad decision she made many years ago.

What unfolds is a tale of three women – Hannah, Marnie, Rachel – and a reflection on grief left unchecked; what it means to be a mother, a daughter; and all the terrible ways in which we can hurt one another. As the mystery of Alice dances on the periphery, it becomes ever clearer that this is a story centred not on a potential crime, but on those left behind by tragedy, desperately seeking closure that might not exist.