The Creeper – Margaret Hickey

If you want to read a murder mystery/thriller set in regional Australia, you could hardly be in better hands than Margaret Hickey’s. The award-winning author did her PhD on depictions of landscape in Australian literature, so she’s got it down cold (or hot, as the case may be). Her latest is The Creeper, a “pitch perfect outback noir” novel kindly sent to me for review by Penguin Books Australia.

The inciting incident for this “eerie and vivid” novel takes place ten years before it begins: with a presumed murder-suicide on a mountaintop. A local ‘creeper’ (thus the title) apparently shot and killed several hikers before turning his shotgun on himself. On the anniversary of the tragic event, the new cop in the small town decides to turn over a few stones and make sure nothing was missed in the initial investigation – can you see where this is going?

The Creeper is told mostly in the present day, with frequent flashbacks to the day of the murders. The chapters get shorter as the pace picks up, and we get closer to the truth. It’s absolutely raining potential leads-slash-red herrings at first – the cop’s boyfriend, the kindly neighbour, the big-shot cop from the neighbouring town, the ring-in cop sent to help out, the lone hiker, the local school teacher – but gradually the focus hones in on each victim and the shadows they brought with them from their past.

What I found most interesting about The Creeper was the perspective on policing in a small town. Sally is (quite literally, for most of the novel) the only cop in town, and a young one at that (24 years old), so she struggles with finding an appropriate balance between establishing authority and ingratiating herself with the community. When she pulls someone over for speeding, it turns out to be a friend of her boyfriend’s – that’s an awkward ticket to write. A casual chat over dinner with friends turns into an interview with crucial evidence to be uncovered. Sally’s a bit “not like other girls”y at times, but she has a tough row to hoe in The Creeper and it’s interesting to watch her piece it all together.

Read The Creeper on audiobook via Libro.fm here. (affiliate link)