‘Wake‘ is not so much a mystery novel as a story about two survivors of a trauma whose lives have been twisted out of shape in different ways by the unanswered questions surrounding the disappearance of a little girl from a sheep farm nineteen years earlier.

It’s a slow-burn story where the plot twists aren’t built to shock or surprise but to deepen the reader’s engagement with the characters. 

The sheepfarm and the small town near to it are more than a setting for the story, they are almost characters in their own right, both shaping and reflecting the experience of the main characters. To my Brit eyes, the huge scale of the sheepfarm and its taken-for-granted isolation were startling, The farm, once bustling but now destocked, ravaged by years of drought and now run by a skeleton crew who do little more than maintenance, was a physical manifestation of what had happened to the life of Mina, the twin sister who wasn’t taken, after her sister’s disappearance. 

The story has the framework of a mystery, with Lane Holland, a Private Investigator, coming to Mina McCreary’s farm to try and solve a notorious decades-old cold case. Except Mina doesn’t want him there and he has an agenda that goes way beyond solving the case to get the substantial reward money.

Lane and Mina both start as enigmatic figures with pasts that have left them scarred and which still hold their present ransom. What those pasts were and if or how they were linked is what most of the story is about. 

Although this is a story about a cold case, it doesn’t feel like a solve-the-puzzle mystery or like a dramatised True Crime. It felt more like real life, where things are never neat and tidy, misunderstandings are common and things never quite turn out the way you thought they would.

There’s a lot in the book about how parents influence children, the unreliability of memory, the parasitical nature of social media keyboard warriors who turn personal tragedies into public myths and the persistence of grief and guilt.

At the heart of it are two damaged people who need to find a way of looking forward and not backwards.

‘Wake‘ is the start of a series of books featuring PI Lane Holland. I’ve pre-ordered the next book, ‘Murder Town‘ (a.k.a ‘Ripper‘) which is scheduled for release as an audiobook on 28th December 2023. 

I recommend the audiobook version of ‘Wake‘ narrated by Jacquie Brennan. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.

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