Detective Andy Cooper is about to retire. She isn’t sure what’s next … perhaps traveling in the RV she has yet to buy, with a dog she doesn’t currently own. Perhaps gardening near the ever-shrinking patch of woods behind her house—once the cable company’s backhoe is removed.

She’ll need to do something, if only to distract herself from how empty her life has become. After the murder of her young daughter by a drunk driver. After the divorce. After the realization that all she has is her job and that she’s about to lose that, too.

Everything changes when bodies begin to turn up. Murdered, but how? Not by knife, gun, or any obvious weapon. teeth marks. Chunks missing. Like they’d been chewed on. And not by humans.

As she’s struggling to solve her final case, an unexpected new friendship seems like just what Andy needs. Where she is detached from life, Fiona embraces it. Where she is a homebody, Fiona roams. Yet the women are drawn together by a shared love of nature and wildlife. Until Andy learns the dark truth behind Fiona’s smile. A secret that threatens to unravel the world as she knows it.

When I stumbled across the recently released ‘Something of a Calling’, I already had my reading week mapped out, and this book wasn’t on it. Then I listened to the opening chapter, pushed my plans aside and spent a day immersed in a most unusual book.

It was a compelling, almost mesmerising read. Given that Zoje Stage has been a Bram Stoker nominee, I’d expected this to be a horror novel, albeit an unconventional one. It’s not horror; it’s speculative fiction at its best.

The intent here isn’t to frighten or repulse, but to engender empathy, consider the possibilities and costs of change, and reflect on what each of us is willing to take responsibility for. 

The story is initially structured as a police procedural, focused on extraordinary events seen through the eyes of a days-from-retirement police detective whose life is in a period of transition that challenges her to consider who she is and who she wants to be. 

Despite the trappings of a mystery, this is less about solving a puzzle than it is about a process of discovery aimed at a paradigm shift, a reassessment of how the main character sees the world and her place in it.

I can’t say more about the content without risking spoilers, so I’ll finish by saying, if you start this novel with no genre expectations and let the prose carry you where it wants to go, you’ll meet interesting, credible people making hard choices at a difficult time and you’ll be invited to see the world differently. It’s not a cosy ride. It has violence at its core. It’s not a polemic. It makes an argument, but it’s an argument that isn’t free of moral challenges, and some of the outcomes of accepting the argument are genuinely frightening. I found it a journey worth making. 

I recommend the audiobook verions of ‘Something of a Calling’, Jenn Lee’s narration was perfectly pitched to keep me immersed in the novel.