FICTION The Creeper Margaret Hickey Bantam, $34.99 Apparently, there is now such a thing as a “destination thriller”, which introduces the reader to an appealing location they might be tempted to visit. It’s an interesting proposition given that most thrillers involve something bad happening even in glorious settings.
As is the case in Margaret Hickey’s latest police procedural, The Creeper , set in an idyllic country town in north-east Victoria. There’s a touch of the gothic in Margaret Hickey’s latest police procedural. Credit: Charlotte Guest Senior Constable Sally White, the stepdaughter of Assistant Commissioner Angelo Conti, has recently taken up a post in Edenville where she is living her best life with a handsome new boyfriend, park ranger Jim Brear.
Sally loves Edenville, with its “maple-lined streets and evergreen poplars” even if it has been recently discovered by the tourists, the tree changers and grey nomads who have driven up the house prices while encouraging a lot of new business. Sally also loves being in sole possession of the local police station with its white weatherboard trim, roses and geraniums “like something from a children’s storybook”. But there’s another side to Edenville: the smaller landowners doing it tough, the family violence calls and the intervention orders.
And then there’s the Durant family. “There’s a Durant family in every town,” Sally’s boss informs her over the phone. This is the family that lives on the margins, that gets in trouble with the law, that neglects the children who are taken into custody by human services.
But not all such families have a son accused of killing five people on a bushwalk 10 years earlier, in a case immortalised by the press as The Mountain Murders. This is where The Creeper begins, with a lost couple squabbling on a hiking trip when they encounter a terrified woman covered in blood and screaming for help. Then we flip to Sally, contemplating the 10-year anniversary of the murders and wondering whether the police got it right when they decided that Bill Durant, who conveniently shot himself at the scene, was the killer known as The Creeper.
Bill’s brother Lex is adamant that the police got it wrong, as he tells Sally when she visits him in his old weatherboard house at the foot of the mountain with its “definite Wolf Creek vibe”. There’s a gothic undertow here, nicely echoed in the fact that Sally’s boyfriend is reading Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde while Sally herself, not a reader, has given up on that book about a “woman wandering around on the moors crying all the time and getting rained on”. Hickey’s bubbly sense of humour lightens the potential gloom.
Nonetheless, the plot thickens nicely while being vaguely reminiscent of Jane Harper’s Force of Nature in its focus on diverse people undertaking a challenging hike that all goes wrong. Each has their own motives for being there: motives that are intimately connected to the reason they are all killed. Despite the dark doings, The Creeper might indeed be a destination police procedural, given the lovely descriptions of the terrain over which the hikers walk, the spectacular views, the alpine herb fields, and the soaring wedge-tailed eagle.
Just don’t think too hard about the tiger snake and the murderous stalker. One of them is fictional. Having solved the case of The Creeper, will Sally stay on in Edenville for her next outing, or will she move on? With her energy, smarts and Girl Scout goodness, she’s a delightful character with just enough complexity to be interesting without overshadowing the action.
Wherever she ends up, she’ll be worth following. The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday .
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