Роман Робин Деннисон «In Plain Sight»: детектив о травмах прошлого и жестокости подросткового мира

Robyn Dennison’s first adult novel is a character-centric crime outing that isn’t afraid to deal with some tough subject matter. The novel follows her highly acclaimed YA novel Blind Spot, about a teenage boy who witnesses a girl being sexually assaulted at a party. Themes involving power, gender and responsibility are clearly an area of interest for the Melbourne-based writer. In Plain Sight finds interesting ways to approach these issues in a crime fiction format. The character of Detective Lara Wilton – a gay woman in her mid-30s who works in a Sydney police unit that investigates child abuse – is one who will live on in the mind of readers. She’s gritty, smart and tough, but that steely exterior masks great self-doubt. When she’s put in charge of an investigation into a man whose wife has found child abuse material on his laptop, the case takes Wilton out of Sydney and back to the New South Wales town where she grew up. There she finds that the policeman assigned to assist her is a high school acquaintance from almost two decades before. The intervening years haven’t been kind to either; Wilton has just left what had become a serious relationship with a woman she met in a bar one boozy night some years before. She’s restless, drinks too much and is haunted by certain incidents in her past, while Ben is in a loveless marriage with a woman who desperately wants a child. He’s not so sure. We also meet two strident, damaged teenage twins. Dennison is skilled at capturing the false bravado of the teen psyche: “She is 17 and she believes she knows everything there is to know about life and herself, and she believes it with a certainty only available to people too young to know otherwise.” The twins’ parents are distracted figures and are never really explored by Dennison. The mother is mentally disturbed and out of it on prescription pills much of the time, while the father is emotionally and physically remote, leaving the girls to raise themselves; and, along with help from their elder brother, they do. Their lives mirror many others of that age – inappropriate boyfriends, drugs, sex and parties that they barely remember, all captured vividly here. In another, possibly unnecessary, story arc, a police colleague, and someone Wilton had regarded as a friend, has been suspended for inappropriately accessing a police database containing child abuse material. “You can never really know another person. You can never know what they’re capable of.” While there are traces of Dennison the YA author from time to time – “Now that Amanda is a superintendent, Lara is a little ant crawling along the pavement by her shoe” – the novel grows in confidence. Although it draws on familiar police procedural conventions, it’s best when describing the travails of adolescence and the pressures on young women in an unforgiving, social media-led world. Not everything works, but this is still a powerful and unsettling read.