Category: Mystery/Suspense Publisher: Patmay Press
Copyright: Dec 9, 2010
Two months after finding her fiancé’s naked corpse hanging from a wardrobe rail in their apartment, Jemma Dalton’s sister takes her own life, leaving Jemma to probe the dark shadows of her sister’s life.
When soon-to-be-wed Tanya Clark is confronted with her fiancé's naked corpse hanging from a wardrobe rail in the upmarket Melbourne apartment they share, her life is torn apart. Two months later, distraught and unable to cope, she drowns her sorrows in a lethal cocktail of alcohol and prescription drugs.
On the other side of Australia, a grieving Jemma Dalton struggles to come to terms with the suicide of her only sibling. Despite there being no evidence to the contrary, Jemma refuses to accept Tanya had intended to kill herself. Not her sister. Then the coroner's report reveals that at the time of her death she had been six weeks pregnant. The will, too, raises more questions than it answers. How did a young woman on a personal assistant's wage amass shares worth in excess of $1,000,000?
In a desperate bid to uncover the truth, Jemma puts her own life at risk and starts to probe the shadows of her sister's life. But shadows, like bones, grow brittle with age. The consequences can be deadly.
Excerpt
PROLOGUE
One foot inside the apartment, the smell hit her. Sour, like cat pee. Except they didn’t own a cat.
“Sean?” she called, her voice cracking. She cleared her throat. “Sean, honey, are you home?” Louder this time.
Not a sound. Only that putrid smell.
She dumped her heavy satchel on the floor, kicked the door closed, and surveyed the room.
The late afternoon sun streamed through the balcony-facing floor-to-ceiling windows. Long shadows from the life-sized, headless bronze nudes standing sentry sliced the living area. The Age newspaper lay open at the business section in the middle of the narrow glass-topped dining table, Sean’s mobile phone next to it. Apart from one of the eight chairs sitting askew from the table, she could have stepped into the pages of Home Beautiful.
She crossed the carpet toward the short hall that led to the bedrooms and stuck her head into the apartment’s galley-style kitchen. Tomatoes, red onions and a cling-wrapped tray of meat – the makings of what looked to be one of her fiancé’s specialties, Spanish steak – sat on the stainless steel drainer next to the sink. Further down the bench, she spotted a bottle of red wine together with two wine glasses, one of which was already poured. She sniffed the air and moved on.
Usually wide open, the door to the guest bedroom was half-closed. Hoping Sean hadn’t offered a bed to one of his boozy mates, she hesitated for a moment and then gave the door a sharp shove.
The door swung in, releasing a rush of sour air. Pinching her nostrils together, she leaned into the room, ready to beat a hasty retreat if anyone was in there. Her gaze went first to the queen-sized bed. Although the quilt looked rumpled, the bed itself didn’t appear to have been slept in.
Breathing out through her mouth, she glanced across the bedroom to where sunlight, filtered through the window’s upward angled Venetians, striped the ceiling.
She took another step into the room and turned around. The leather strap of her handbag slid from her shoulder. She didn’t try to stop it, couldn’t stop it. Unable to move, all she could do was gape at the open wardrobe, her eyes bulging almost as much as the vacant ones staring back at her.
A silent scream blocked her throat. She couldn’t breathe in; she couldn’t breathe out. Her lungs wanted to burst. The purple, bloated face of the naked man hanging from the wardrobe’s steel rail on a belt, his swollen tongue protruding from his mouth, was almost unrecognizable. Almost.
She stumbled backwards, snaring her handbag as she landed in a heap next to the bed. She scrambled in the bottom of her bag, her mobile phone eluding her like wet soap in the bathtub. When she did manage to get hold of it, she struggled to still her shaking hands. Her fingers felt fat and clumsy, the buttons on her phone tinier than she remembered.
“Emergency. What service do you require? Police, Fire, Ambulance?”
She opened her mouth to answer, but a magazine page stuck to her leg now had her attention instead. She peeled it off, dangling the magazine at arm’s length as if it were a dirty sock. She had never seen anything quite like it. Naked flesh. Entwined bodies. Explicit sex scenes.
If she had thought things couldn’t get any worse, she had thought wrong. She shook her head, unable to come to terms with what she was seeing. Her fiancé, her lover, her partner was dead; dead and surrounded with hard-core homosexual pornography.
CHAPTER 1
Jemma Dalton rubbed her bare arms, wondering what it would take to convince her dour-faced taxi driver to adjust the air conditioning to something less than Antarctic. Deciding it wasn’t worth the effort, she settled back in her seat and watched as the scenery rushed past; there one moment, gone the next. Like the people in her life.
She twisted the skin on the back of her hand, pinching it between her nails, needing the solace of physical pain. Anything to fill the void inside her. Losing her big sister – her only sister – had been devastating enough, but the coroner’s finding of suicide had pushed her past the pain threshold.
According to what she had been told, her 35-year-old sister, Tanya Clark, had been so depressed after the death of her fiancé, Sean Mullins, and the manner in which he died, that she had taken her own life two months later. Despite there being no evidence to the contrary, Jemma didn’t want to believe it. Not her sister.
The Melbourne city skyline loomed in the distance, reminding Jemma of the reason for her visit. Though Tanya’s body had been flown to Perth and laid to rest beside their beloved mother, her essence was here; the place she had lived and worked for all her adult life.
Up ahead, a monumental yellow beam, cantilevered at a precarious angle, hung out over the freeway. On the other side, a line of giant, red sticks leaned toward it creating a portal: Melbourne’s gateway. When they passed through the sound tube on the other side, a 300-metre long steel ribcage, she knew she wasn’t far from her destination.
What she hadn’t counted on was getting caught in the gridlocked inner city traffic. By the time the taxi arrived outside the property manager’s office, a suited, dark-haired man was locking up.
She leapt out of the taxi. “Please wait. I’ll just be a minute.”
From the look on the driver’s face, she had asked him to cut off his right hand. Double-parked, he had no choice but to wait. Not if he wanted his fare. Besides, her luggage was still in the boot.
Dodging a group of Asian tourists taking photographs, she raced across the footpath. If she couldn’t persuade the man in the suit to open up again, she would have to fork out for a hotel. That or sleep on the street.
Profuse apologies and some fast-talking had the desired result. A few minutes later, she had the key to her sister’s rented apartment and a swipe card to access the building.
The taxi driver paid, her luggage unloaded, she set off.
Her mobile phone rang while she was humping her cases along the footpath. She ignored it, more intent on escaping the heat, traffic fumes and noise. She pushed on, perspiration matting her fringe to her forehead. Not much further…
Number 299. She shouldered through the thick glass entrance door, shoving her luggage ahead of her into the airlock separating the street from the building’s lobby. She paused for breath. Nearly there.
She swiped her security card, unlocking the next set of glass doors. The cool, marble-tiled lobby was empty and still, the only sound the echo of her own sigh. No airplane hum. No traffic drone. No clanging trams. No ringing mobile phones.
A bank of brushed-steel fronted mailboxes occupied the wall to her left. To her right hung a mural-sized Aboriginal painting made up of thousands of white dots on a black background.
She heard a swish and looked around to see the doors of one of the two lifts part. A tall, angular-faced, brunette strode out toward the glass doors, her imaginary blinkers preventing even a cursory glance in Jemma’s direction.
Jemma hauled her luggage into the vacated lift and pushed the button for the sixth floor. Seconds later, the doors opened. She stepped out, looking up and down the carpeted, windowless corridor for numbers.
Two doors down on her right she found apartment 367. Her mobile rang again just as she was inserting the key into the lock. She gritted her teeth and turned the key. Couldn’t he take a hint? She wasn’t ready to talk. Not yet.
Professional Reviews
BigAl's Books and Pals
Appraisal:
Tyley is a master at weaving a complex, multilayered plot. The many characters Jemma meets starting with the manager of her sister’s apartment and the police detective who assists her, continuing to her sister’s friends and co-workers, all have unclear alliances and murky agendas. Everyone is a possible ally or a potential foe. The more Jemma uncovers about her sister and the other characters the cloudier the picture gets. Somehow Tyley managed to keep me guessing and second guessing what really happened right up until the end.
FYI:
Ms Tyley is an Australian resident and the book takes place in Australia. This means you’ll see an occasional Aussie-ism. There is also some word usage that may be unfamiliar to US readers as well as Australian/UK spelling.
Format/Typo Issues:
Although the version I reviewed was a pre-release copy it had been formatted for the Kindle and had no significant formatting or typo issues.
Rating: ***** 5 Stars
An American Editor
Several months ago I bought the ebook of Vicki Tyley’s Thin Blood at Smashwords. The synopsis looked interesting, and several people on another forum remarked positively on the ebook. I thought I couldn’t go wrong at the price. Even if I didn’t like the book, it wasn’t much of an investment.
Thin Blood, which is the story of a reporter’s investigation of a decade-old murder, reignited my interest in the mystery genre. Thin Blood is a compelling story with a twist, and Tyley keeps the reader’s interest with her articulate prose. The writing style reminded me very much of the Ed McBain/Dashiell Hammett style — sentences that have been stripped down to the barebones.
After reading Thin Blood, I had to read the other mysteries written by Tyley, Sleight Malice and Brittle Shadows. In Sleight Malice, the lead character is devastated by what she thinks is the death in a house fire of her best friend. Then she learns that the body found in the fire is male, not female, and she teams up with a private investigator to discover the truth.
In Brittle Shadows, the body of our heroine’s sister’s fiance is found hanging in his closet, presumably death by accident. Two months later, the heroine’s sister commits suicide, an act that our heroine cannot accept, especially when she learns that at the time of her death, the sister was 6 weeks pregnant.
Each of the three books is different, yet all are united by a single characteristic: strong, female leads. Tyley’s characterizations allow the reader to grasp the mental framework of the lead females. The writing is taut, direct, and without waste. Throughout the three books, there were only a couple minor grammar errors, at least from an American perspective. I admit that I am not familiar with Australian style.
What I find particularly interesting is that even with the very high quality of the writing, Vicki Tyley, as is the case with the exceptionally talented New Zealand writer, Shayne Parkinson (see On Books: The Promises to Keep Quartet), remains unsigned by the major traditional publishing houses. Makes me wonder if there is a Down Under bias.
There is no question in my mind that Vicki Tyley is the Australian P.D. James — a writer whose work is a can’t miss read. The writing is outstanding, the stories creative. The one failing is that her female leads are frenetic. Interestingly, although the female leads are as strong a character as any of the males in the story, and often even stronger, they do not comport themselves as well as their male counterparts in stress situations, leaving the impression that they are weaker than their male counterparts. It is almost as if Tyley is suggesting that no matter how strong a woman is, she is still emotionally ruled whereas men are both strong and emotionless, or at least better capable of contolling their emotions and thus more objective under stress.
MotherLode
A tragedy surrounded by controversy leads a devastated fiance to her own deadly act, and her shattered sister is left to pick up the pieces. Something just doesn't seem right about the circumstances surrounding her sister's death, and Jemma is determined to discover what that is. Despite veiled threats and mysterious events, Jemma persists in following the clues to their inevitable ending. If she trusts the wrong person along the way, she may not live long enough to put all the pieces together...
As with Vicki Tyley's other books, this book grips you from the very first scene, setting up a ride that twists and turns until the very end. New clues lead to potential suspects, and it's anyone's guess as to the who, what, and, most importantly for the reader, the why. As I read, I constantly formulated and dismissed perpetrators and motivations, as each page turn brought me closer to the surprise ending. Along the way, I fingered the right person, only to change my mind a few pages later. This book manages to get the reader to become an active participant in the story, and that always makes for an enjoyable read.
The characters were defined nicely, and I felt I really got to know each of them. I could genuinely relate to Jemma, and I felt liked her character. Through her eyes, I was able to get to know the other characters a little more, including the sister who was tragically lost. The writing style is fluid, for the most part, and very readable. The book has that "fun factor;" interesting and enjoyable, and difficult to put down before you've devoured every bit.
Although I really enjoyed the overall story, the jumps between many of the chapters was somewhat bothersome. I also noted this when I reviewed one of her previous releases, "Sleight Malice." Some chapters would end in a bit of a cliff-hanger, but the next chapter started hours after the cliff-hanger had been resolved. When this happens, the readers miss out on experiencing the anxiety and intensity along with the main characters, and it takes us away from that sense of being present. I'm present right up to the cliff-hanger, then I feel detached as I struggle to figure out what's happened. It's akin to having a brief blackout and then trying to recreate what you must have missed. An effective technique when used sparingly, but somewhat disconcerting when used with relative frequency.
Overall, a recommended read. A Vicki Tyley book is always a good bet, and I look forward to each new release!
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