As the third wave of the virus hits, all inhabitants of Melbourne are given until 8 pm to get to their homes. Wherever they are when the curfew begins, they must live for four weeks and stay within five kilometres of. When Lou’s son, Samuel, doesn’t arrive home by nightfall, she begins to panic.
He doesn’t answer his phone. He doesn’t message. His social media channels are inactive. Lou is out of her mind with worry, but she can’t go to the police, because she has secrets of her own. Secrets that Samuel just can’t find out about. Lou must find her son herself and bring him home.

I came to ‘Home Before Night‘ with high expectations after having read ‘Tell Me Lies‘ which opened with a woman pushing a man in front of a train on the Melbourne Metro and then spent the rest of the novel on what generated the anger and hate behind that push. It was a story riddled with lies and deceptions, soaked in threat and guilt and it kept me on the edge of my seat. 

‘Home Before Night‘ starts with a new mother leaving her baby with her husband on the beach to cool off in the calm shallows. Then she gets caught in an undertow and the father has to decide whether to stay with the baby or rescue his wife. The action is vivid and intense. And that’s only the prologue. 

The action rolls forward nearly two decades and we’re watching a divorced single mother worrying because her teenage son hasn’t returned home before curfew on the first night of the new lockdown.

The atmosphere was filled with anxiety. There was a strong sense that something was wrong but I didn’t know what. I didn’t know enough about the mother to assess her reactions or enough about the son to guess what he was up to but there was more going on than just a missed curfew.

As the story went on there are hints about crimes and cover-ups in the parents’ past. There are doubts about the son’s new girlfriend and her cultish family. There are doubts about just about everyone and everything and by the time I was halfway through, I knew that lockdown was the least important part of the tale and that guilt, lies and betrayals were driving the increasingly dark plot which was clearly headed towards a violent confrontation.

Even though I was looking for misdirection and I knew I didn’t really know what was going on, the twist, when it came, caught me completely by surprise and was different and worse than I’d expected. 

I listened to ‘Home Before Night‘ on a long, but not-quite-long-enough, car ride. I was so wrapped up in the story that I had immediately to sit down for another ninety minutes to find out how the story ended.

So, ‘Home Before Night‘ had a strong, engaging plot with clever misdirection and a surprising premise which hooked my curiosity and held it to the end. There were points in the book where it seemed to me that the pacing was off. These were mostly moments of introspection when the mother or the son were going through the options of what could be going on and what they should be doing next. These moments went on a little too long and felt a little clunky. Perhaps it was because the introspection was being used for plot exposition rather than character development that made the text drag a little.

Even so, the book was fun and I’ll be back for more. I have J. P. Pomare’s latest book, ‘Trapdoor‘ (2023) and ‘In The Clearing‘ (2019) in my TBR pile. 

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