Adelaide – The Unseen Library

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia (ebook – 2 April 2025)

Series: Standalone

Length: 352 pages

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Australian author Michelle Prak takes aim at a serious issue in Australian society, with her intriguing standalone thriller, Barren Cape, a great book I had the pleasure of reading in early 2025.

Plot Synopsis:

An abandoned resort seems the perfect place to hide, but is Barren Cape a refuge or a trap?

Former housemates Mac and Erika are homeless.

Well, Erika is fine, she just has to live with her parents until she can find another rental. Mac’s situation is much worse – family isn’t an option and she’s surfing the couches of her increasingly exasperated friends.

Driving around one lonely afternoon, Mac discovers Barren Cape. Once destined to be a luxury escape, now it’s just wire fence and grey cement. It’s stark, but quiet. There’s no harm in staying here a little while …

From the bestselling author of The Rush, this is the chilling result of people pushed to the fringes of society and forced to make unthinkable choices.

Barren Cape was a very compelling read from Prak that combines a cool thriller narrative with an interesting look at the current dire housing situation in Australia. Set around the city of Adelaide, Barren Cape follows three separate protagonists, including roommates Mac and Erika who find themselves homeless after losing their rental, and young teen Brex, whose family life forces her to leave home and try to find alternate accommodation.

All three point-of-view characters are eventually drawn towards the abandoned building development of Barren Cape, whose cement rooms appear to be the perfect place to hang out while the protagonists try to find their separate ways in life. However, the interactions between the three protagonists leads to a great layer of drama within the plot, which is thrown into overdrive when another resident of Barren Cape is discovered. This leads to a dark, conflict laden second half of Barren Cape, which only gets worse with every single mistake and bad decision the protagonists make. Prak constantly twists the story around, ensuring that you don’t know what’s going to happen next, and resulting in a complicated ending, where the characters try to move on to better things after experiencing some trauma.

I felt that Barren Cape came together extremely well, especially when it came to the author’s compelling examination of Australia’s housing crisis and its impacts. Showcasing various levels of the struggle in one city, Prak paints a pretty desperate picture around the lack of accommodation for vulnerable people, enough so that camping out an isolated and abandoned building site seems like a reasonable option. I really appreciated how Prak explored the characters’ desperation around this key issue, and the lengths they will go to maintain even this level of housing security. The drama that flows from this desperation, which includes some characters even overlooking murder, is intense, and its connection to a real issue ensures that all the character’s struggles are quite relatable.

One issue I had with Barren Cape was that parts of this narrative weren’t as exciting as I had hoped, with the plot mostly resolving around interactions between relatively normal characters. However, I think that this perceived lack of excitement was more on me as I was expecting a horror/slasher story, with some dangerous figures stalking the protagonists. It did feel that Prak was setting that up at times, especially with a scene around a dangerous group on the beach and a stalker for one of the characters, two story elements that never really went anywhere. One scene where a female character, who spends most of the book bodybuilding at the gym, was wrestled down by children, also took me out of the plot a little, although it led to some interesting follow-up moments. Still, the rest of the book with its complex interactions and clever take on a major modern issue helped to balance these issues out, and I ended up having a good time with this compelling novel.

Overall, Barren Cape was an excellent Australian novel from Michelle Prak, who produced an interesting and thought-provoking read. Moving, intense and diving into something that is causing a lot of concern in modern Australia, Barren Cape is well worth a read, and I’ll be curious to see what Prak writes next.

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Publisher: Hachette Australia (Trade Paperback – 28 August 2024)

Series: Petticoat Police Mystery – Book One

Length: 312 pages

My Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars

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Australian author Lainie Anderson presents a fun and compelling historical murder mystery that looks at a unique Australian historical figure with The Death of Dora Black.

Plot Synopsis:

Summer, Adelaide, 1917. The impeccably dressed Miss Kate Cocks might look more like a schoolmistress than a policewoman, but don’t let that fool you. She’s a household name, wrangling wayward husbands into repentance, seeing through deceptive clairvoyants, and rescuing young women (whether they like it or not) with the help of a five-foot cane and her sassy junior constable, Ethel Bromley.

When shop assistant Dora Black is found dead on a city beach, Miss Cocks and Ethel are ordered to stay out of the investigation and leave it to the men. But when Dora’s workmate goes missing soon after, the women suspect something sinister, and determine to take matters into their own hands. After all, who knows Adelaide better than the indomitable Miss Cocks?

*In 1915, Fanny Kate Boadicea Cocks became the first policewoman in the British Empire employed on the same salary as men. This novel is a rich exploration of that little-known chapter of Australian history.*

The Death of Dora Black was a particularly interesting and entertaining read from Lainie Anderson, who has struck upon a fascinating figure to set her book around. The first book in Anderson’s new Petticoat Policy Mystery series, The Death of Dora Black was a clever novel that blended the real-life history of the infamous Miss Kate Cocks with the author’s own crime fiction narrative.

Starting out in Adelaide, 1917, the book’s story sees formidable real-life police officer Miss Kate Cocks become embroiled in a deadly murder mystery when shop assistant Dora Black is found dead on the city’s beach. What follows is an excellent story that blends the historical exploits of Cocks, which included helping the needy of Adelaide in her own unique way and attempting to save the morality of the young women of the city with her cane, with a gritty informal murder investigation. This later investigation of course adds most of the meat to the story, as Cocks, and her junior constable Ethel Bromley, uncover a dark conspiracy of murder, drugs and kidnapping, with its roots deep in the heart of the city.

Anderson brings these disparate elements together into a fantastic overall read, and it was fascinating to see the more cozy and historical elements you would associate with Kate Cocks and her real-life actions blend with a darker murder plot. I felt that Anderson’s main murder mystery was very well set out, and the resulting investigation by two underestimated women got quite thrilling and exciting. There are some dark moments and intriguing twists featured throughout this plot, and Anderson produces a particularly powerful crime fiction narrative. The entire murder mystery and the investigative arc came together extremely well, and I really enjoyed seeing Anderson’s unique protagonists trying to solve the case in their own unique way. The background setting of Adelaide during World War I also added quite a lot to the narrative, and the author provided a complex and detailed recreation of the historical setting.

The real highlight of The Death of Dora Black was the intriguing main protagonists, Miss Kate Cocks and her junior constable Ethel Bromley. The two protagonists play off each other extremely well throughout the course of the novel, and the blend of personalities, with the strict but caring Kate and the sassy and exceedingly keen Ethel, proved to be a winning combination. Readers will particularly enjoy Anderson’s portrayal of Miss Kate Cocks in this book, especially as the author tried to capture all this unique figures’ quirks and historical reputation. Anderson, who is a major expert on Kate Cocks, paints her as a particularly complex and conflicted figure driven by her religious principals but also willing to do the moral choice and help anyone in need. It was fascinating to see Miss Cocks wander around historical Adeliade, distributing her moral judgement with her cane, while also solving problems no-one else can. Anderson succeeded in capturing various aspects of her occasionally controversial history, and I really appreciated the way in which she converted her into a fearsome crime-fighting force, capable of hunting down murderers and drug smugglers. The utilisation of this very distinctive figure helped to turn The Death of Dora Black into something very special, and I look forward to more exploits with Miss Kate Cocks in the future.

Overall, I felt that The Death of Dora Black was an amazing and highly entertaining novel from Lainie Anderson, who successfully brings her real-life historical protagonist to life and sets a wonderfully enjoyable crime fiction book around her. Clever, fascinating, and with a lot of crossover appeal to many different readers, The Death of Dora Black was a great book, and I had a ton of fun getting through it.

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