JANE HARPER

FROM THE PREFACE: ” It wasn’t as though the farm hadn’t seen death before, and the blowflies didn’t discriminate. To them there was little difference between a carcass and a corpse.

The drought had left the flies spoiled for choice that summer. They sought out unblinking eyes and sticky wounds as the farmers of Kiewarra levelled their rifles at skinny livestock. No rain meant no feed. And no feed made for difficult decisions, as the tiny town shimmered under day after day of burning blue sky…”

Sydney. Pan Macmillan. 2016. 347p.

MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

Regina Janes

FROM THE PREFACE: Why should anyone, especially sophisticated people like you and me, regard so widespread a cultural practice as beheadings as repellent? About 160,000 years ago, homo sapiens idaltu separated heads from bodies.' Homo sapiens sapiens still does. Disagreeable, fascinating, horrific, laughable, headless bodies and bodiless heads are all around us. Tim Burton, whose Sleepy Hollow (1999) sent heads flying, claims severed heads create unease that one cannot put one's finger on.? Garrison Keillor begins the millennium with a snowboarding beheading in Lake Wobegon where "we don't have many beheadings."3 Snoopy horrifies himself by accidentally beheading a snowman. Decapitating murderers horrify the rest of us, populating our prisons, our films, and our fictions. Horror or comedy: decapitation owes its current characteristic shudder to the placement of violence within the modern ideology of the body. Decapitation, like other mutilations, makes visible a violence that the west has been campaigning to make invisible since the seventeenth century, when our body-based ideology begins to emerge.

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS. New York and London. 2005. 266p.

By Paula Hawkins

An addictive novel of psychological suspense from the author of #1 New York Times bestseller and global phenomenon The Girl on the Train and A Slow Fire Burning.

“Hawkins is at the forefront of a group of female authors . . who have reinvigorated the literary suspense novel by tapping a rich vein of psychological menace and social unease… there’s a certain solace to a dark escape, in the promise of submerged truths coming to light.” —Vogue

A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged.
 
Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother's sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she'd never return.
 
With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller, The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as well as the devastating ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present.

London. Transworld. Penguin. 2017. 357p.