Bite on this: When terror of sharks shifts onshore
A serial killer is prowling the beaches of Perth in a compelling new crime thriller from Emma Styles.
The opening line of Emma Styles’ bio says she “writes Australian noir about young women taking on the patriarchy”.
While The Shark is only her second novel, Styles’ theme of interest has so far served her well, with first release No Country for Girls winning the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize.
Born in the UK, where she is currently again living, as a child Styles’ family moved to Perth where she stayed until well into her adulthood, working as a veterinarian.
Styles has been hugely influenced by her adopted country’s open spaces, as well as being fascinated by the wildlife, which has an uncanny ability to kill or injure you. She also encountered in Australia some of the less appealing aspects of the blokey culture, such as when young women are targeted by misogyny and violence.
In The Shark Styles has two young women as co-protagonists, just as she did in No Country for Girls. The setting is Perth’s beachside suburb of Cottesloe, where a serial killer is on the loose. Nicknamed “The Shark,” this person disposes of the female victims’ bodies so that they wash up on the beach. The first victim had the sort of injuries that suggested a shark attack, hence the killer’s moniker. There is a guy called Neil Fraser Lock, who has been named in public as a person of interest.
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It’s not a spoiler (because it’s in the blurb) that Lock is abducted and imprisoned by Raych and Carmen, two young women who are convinced he is guilty. They’re fed up with what they see as police incompetence and are out to wreak revenge. Or maybe not. They’re not sure. All they know is they need to find out the truth, because each of them has a connection to the killer’s crimes.
The short opening chapter is from Lock’s point of view as he struggles to hear what the two women are talking about while he’s bound and gagged in the back of a car. From there, we flashback a little way and meet Raych and Carmen, notably in first-person narrated chapters for Raych but then in third-person chapters for Carmen. They’ve both got pretty big issues because they met awhile back when they were admitted to a psychiatric unit. Just why they were there is connected to the crimes.
From Raych we learn that someone she cared a lot about, Piper, is missing, presumed to be a victim of The Shark. Raych has been out a lot at night watching Lock and playing a dangerous game as she plans to get him to make a move.
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Raych’s mother is dead and her largely absent FIFO dad has decided they are going to move away in one week’s time, giving Raych’s plan about Lock a ticking-clock component. Her opportunity to find out what happened to Piper will be missed if she doesn’t act quickly.
In Carmen’s chapters, we find out that she is repeating grade 12 (Raych is a few years older). Abandoned by her mother as a baby, she was adopted into a strange, religious family whose biological daughter, Alexis, gives her a hard time repeatedly and with sadistic enjoyment. Carmen tends to have memory lapses, and we learn that she found the body of the serial killer’s first victim.
The tension builds and things you thought were a particular way aren’t necessarily that way at all
The Shark is somewhat of a slow burn at first, and it has to be said that neither Raych nor Carmen are particularly appealing characters. And it’s not until page 120 that they finally do what we have known they were going to do since page one – abduct Lock.
From there, things change dramatically. The tension builds and things you thought were a particular way aren’t necessarily that way at all. The pace really picks up, and you find yourself reading faster, an increasingly urgent need to get to the crux of what’s going on. It is a welcome change from the claustrophobic atmosphere of mostly being inside the two young women’s minds for so long as they ruminate and plot.
There are twists and turns galore in the story and it would be a shame to detail any more of them because to this reader, at least, the plot really was not predictable. This was some compensation for the early challenge of not being emotionally drawn to Raych or Carmen, despite their circumstances making them worthy of empathy.
Styles’ straightforward, no-frills writing is economical while being evocative with its description of Perth’s beaches. You can almost smell the salt and feel the sand between your toes. Also, the author’s skill to build, accelerate and maintain the tension is to be commended. It’s only in the later chapters that the cascading events veer into territory where the suspension of disbelief might be tested.
The Shark by Emma Styles, Hachette Australia, $34.99.
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