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Allen & Unwin, July 2008
Reviewed by Sally Roddom
The latest offering from the great Barry Maitland is a standalone novel
that leads you gently along while keeping a firm hand on your shoulders,
compelling you to stay seated and keep on reading.
Josh returns to Sydney from London with a background hint of something
unsavoury having occurred at the Merchant bank where he worked. An old
university friend, Anna, comes to visit him and tells him that she
believes the death of his ex-girlfriend Lucy was not an accident, but
possibly murder. While Josh was in London he had heard that Lucy died in a
climbing accident on Lord Howe Island during a field study for her
university degree. She was not alone when she died; other members of the
climbing group were on the island: Owen, Curtis, Damien and Marcus. The
official report found that her death was an accident, but her body was
never recovered.
Anna believes it was not an accident or suicide because two more members
of the party, Owen and Curtis, have recently died as a result of a
climbing accident in New Zealand. Just before he died Owen said to Anna,
“We killed her.” From there the story is told alternatively between the
present and a succession of flashbacks. Here the reader learns that Josh
got into rock climbing just so he could meet Lucy, and that the other
members of the group only tolerated him because of Lucy. The mentor of the
group was a university professor, Marcus.
To start with, the reader is not quite sure that a crime has been
committed, and if it has, then why? Following the investigations of Josh
and Anna, the pace gradually builds as the story moves from Sydney to Lord
Howe Island; and the personalities and hidden tensions between the
characters are slowly revealed. There is a marked growth in the characters
of Josh and Anna. It is amazing to see Maitland do this; he gets right
into the heads of his characters and brings the reader in to intimately
respond to them. This is a sign of a very switched-on and intuitive
writer.
BRIGHT AIR is Barry Maitland’s first stand alone crime novel, and the
first he has set in Australia, I hope it is not going to be the last.
July 2008 review originally posted on Murder and Mayhem
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