There’s something about the Australian rural environment that has the capacity to be quite unsettling. Maybe it’s the fact that while it’s undeniably beautiful, our landscape is quite unforgiving. The sea has brutal rips that can and do take lives, the wildlife can be aggressive (when provoked), and the scorching heat and bitter chill are definitively dangerous to the blasé. When combined with the trope of a small country town where everybody is hiding a secret, you have the perfect setting for a creepy thriller.
Arguably, it’s why many Australian thrillers leave the urban environment and are set in the coast—and why I loved how Katherine Firkin’s debut Sticks and Stones found the grisly and unsettling amid the concrete landscape of inner-city Melbourne. Certainly, Nicola West makes the most of the small-town setting in her debut, Catch Us The Foxes, which follows rookie journalist Marlowe ‘Lo’ as she investigates the murder of her childhood friend and the town’s reigning showgirl, the kind and lovely Lily Williams. As Lo doggedly pursues the truth behind what happened to Lily, she not only stumbles upon what seems to be a near town-wide conspiracy linked to the mysterious symbols carved on to Lily’s back, which she sees when she discovers the body and which are subsequently covered up, but she must face the question of what she herself is willing to do in order to escape the stifling insularity of her town—including pursuing questions around Lily’s death that others don’t want her to ask.
It doesn’t feel like a huge spoiler to say that what Lo seems to have uncovered is a cult (the promotional material and blurb pretty heavily hint at it). And really, who doesn’t love a thriller where there’s a cult involved? There’s something about a book with a cult at the heart of the mystery that’s so enthralling. Of course, it also feels as though cults and small towns go hand in hand (a sentence one doesn’t find oneself writing every day, to be sure)—perhaps because of the insularity of smaller communities that one can envisage slipping in to the characteristics of a cult’s behaviour or outlook. West’s descriptions of the township of Kiama have a really grounded feel—probably because it’s where she grew up—and it means the story as it unfolds has the kind of ‘oh god I can totally see this happening’ that drags the reader along, desperately flipping page after page to know the truth behind the various mysteries. While I didn’t find the story progressed at a breakneck pace, I was sufficiently invested in the mystery and premise, and curious to see how it unfolded that I was able to easily power through the sections where I thought to myself ‘ok something could happen now’.
At times, the voice almost felt YA, rather than NA, which isn’t too big of an issue except for the fact that Marlowe’s competence as a reporter and investigator could have been emphasised a bit more to make the investigation she runs feel more authentic and likely (although when you’re in a story about cults in small country towns, how credible are things, really?). As a result, it feels as though this title will have an appeal to people who enjoy reading YA moreso than readers who enjoy the thriller novels of, say, Jonathan Kellerman.
Bookending the narrative with scenes set seven years after the central events of the novel was an interesting authorial choice, and it casts an interesting lens across the story. It does a good job of playing with the trope of the unreliable narrator, and looking at the ongoing question of Marlowe’s ambitious drive to escape the confines of her town and succeed as a journalist and how that may skew what how she presents the historical events she’s relating to us from the first person perspective. With that being said, I thought the final twist of the book did somewhat undercut a really powerful theme that undercut a great deal of the book, which is a shame, because it was an otherwise great twist.
Catch Us The Foxes is an interesting debut from a clearly competent writer. It will be exciting to see how Nicola West’s next books unfold!
Catch Us The Foxes is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of July 7th 2021.
Will you be picking up Catch Us The Foxes? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
Some secrets you try to hide. Others you don’t dare let out … Twin Peaks meets The Dry in a deliciously dark and twisted tale that unravels a small town
Ambitious young journalist Marlowe ‘Lo’ Robertson would do anything to escape the suffocating confines of her small home town. While begrudgingly covering the annual show for the local paper, Lo is horrified to discover the mutilated corpse of Lily Williams, the reigning showgirl and Lo’s best friend. Seven strange symbols have been ruthlessly carved into Lily’s back. But when Lo reports her grisly find to the town’s police chief, he makes her promise not to tell anyone about the symbols. Lo obliges, though it’s not like she has much of a choice – after all, he is also her father.
When Lily’s murder makes headlines around the country and the town is invaded by the media, Lo seizes the opportunity to track down the killer and make a name for herself by breaking the biggest story of her life.
What Lo uncovers is that her sleepy home town has been harbouring a deadly secret, one so shocking that it will captivate the entire nation. Lo’s story will change the course of her life forever, but in a way she could never have dreamed of.
