ANNA CREER reviews new, gripping novels by two Melbourne-based, female crime writers.  

Multi-award-winning, Melbourne based author Sarah Bailey has a background in advertising and communications.

She is currently the managing director of the advertising group JML and the founder of the podcast He Read, She Read. 

Click (Allen & Unwin) is the second in her series featuring Olive (“Oli”) Groves, an investigative journalist. 

It’s a harrowing story of violence against women and begins with a photo of a dead woman sent to Melbourne’s largest newspaper, Melbourne Today, with the message: “Please find attached a photo of victim #2 just after her death at 9.40pm yesterday”.

A month earlier, Marta Hom, a Swedish backpacker had been found in the Treasury Gardens, stabbed to death. Under her body was a polaroid photo and the message #1. 

At the same time, the police are searching for two missing women, Lyta Makis, who failed to come home from a party and Mackenzie Jackson, thought to be a victim of domestic violence. 

Oli Groves now works at Newsday, an online news site, with her partner Timothy (“TJ”) Jack. She is determined to expose the growing scourge of domestic violence.

“She spent the past few months developing a six-part investigative series on the issue that will combine audio episodes and online content”. To conclude the series, she hopes to interview the Premier, Clarissa Dunkley, who has publicly declared that “domestic violence is an issue close to my heart, and I’m pledging to do more to put a stop to it”.

Bailey tells her story in alternating chapters between Oli and her partner keeping track of the developing story and the police investigation from the perspective of a young female detective, Penelope Kibbs.

Bailey in her acknowledgements reveals that “the central plot idea of Click came to me as I was contemplating how hard it is to write crime novels these days, what with all the mobile phones, CCTV and social media”.

Initially she thought she would set the story in the 1990s but instead started researching the dark web and investigating how to doctor images.

The result is what Bailey calls “a dark plot” about misogyny, brutal men and the distortion of reality online. Click is also a damning indictment of the voracious appetite of the 24-hour news cycle and the journalists who feed it.

Oli after a press conference considers her peers “vampiric, eyes glowing and teeth bared, saliva dripping from their mouths as they feast on the juicy story”.

LAURA McClusky is also Melbourne based but The Cursed Road is her second crime novel set in Scotland featuring Detective Inspector Georgina (“Georgie”) Lennox and Detective Inspector Richie Stewart. Georgie has a reputation as both clever and reckless while Richie is kind and dependable. Together they make a formidable team. 

However, as The Cursed Road (HarperCollins) begins they are both still suffering trauma after the horrific conclusion of their case in the previous novel, The Wolf Tree (2025).

Despite this, Superintendent Kylie Cole decides to send them north to Kirkcree, a village that is one of the Highland Gateways to the Cairngorms National Park.

A young woman has been found dead by a remote road, shot in an apparent hunting accident. Without identification she has been named Bambi by the press.

There are only two estates nearby. Fladhain Lodge offers expensive “exclusive experiences” in deer stalking. The owners have influential friends and the police have been told to keep their distance. The bordering estate belongs to the Fairgrieves who have lived there for generations but their fortified mansion is now in a ruinous state and the rather eccentric family is in financial difficulties. 

The locals tell Lennox and Stewart that the road where the body was found is called An Rathad Damante, the Cursed Road because of feuding landowners which led to a massacre at a wedding centuries before. 

The bride, who haunts the road, is regularly heard and seen.

“Even though the road is supposed to be off limits” Geogie is told, “there’s loads of stories about people seeing her out there. Apparently she haunts the border between the two families, trapped by her grief… or by her guilt at being the reason they came together that day.”

What begins as a standard police procedural eventually makes a dramatic shift in pace, tone and style into a full-blown atmospheric and intense story of gothic horror. It’s compelling reading.