Deep in the Australian forests, something dark is stirring.
When wildlife ranger Lisa Thomas finds a pile of animal entrails on her doorstep she immediately suspects her abusive ex, but the sudden spate of deaths that follow seem beyond even Ben’s vindictiveness.
Worse, her father’s health is deteriorating fast and when the harassment and deaths continue, it only fuels her feelings of powerlessness. To add confusion to growing fear, Lisa must also investigate reports of a giant white kangaroo, reports that suggest the creature is no mere hoax.
Yet the mysterious kangaroo is impossible to track down and the more Lisa searches the more she’s sure an even greater threat lurks in the wilderness…
IN A NUTSHELL
‘Crossings’ is a supernatural suspense novel that excelled in atmosphere, with vivid visuals, real people, a few wild ideas, a distinctly Australian flavour, and pacing that kept building suspense. The heroine was engaging and believable. The ending was satisfyingly ragged, resisting the urge to explain the inexplicable, but making the impact on the people clear.
For me, ‘Crossings‘ worked well as a suspense novel. It pulled me in, kept me engaged, surprised me more than once and kept me turning the pages to see how things would work out.
I liked that the first half of the novel was grounded in everyday human evil caused by the violent anger of an abusive man, but always had behind it, a sense of something malevolent and not human working unnoticed because of the noise the man was making. Keeping the supernatural as a whisper in the back of the reader’s mind rather than the main event allowed time to establish the place (a small town in remote rural Australian woodlands), Lisa, our heroine (a young woman with a way with animals, who works part time in the town bar and part time volunteering as a wildlife warden), the people she is connected with and respected by (her co-workers, the local vet, the local sheriff), and her newly-returned-to-town abusive ex-boyfriend. The threatening presense of the violent ex-boyfriend provided an alternative (and more likely) explanaition for the weird animal-related things that keep happening around Lisa.
Even when things escalate as Lisa keeps finding the bodies of men who died through apparent animal attacks, the ex-boyfriend remains the most likely explanation (except to the out-of-town detective who has to consider Lisa a suspect).
The supernatural moved front and centre in the second half of the book, leaving no doubt that we were deep in woo-woo land and that the apparently animal inhabitants were lethal and angry. When this first happened, I was cheering for the lethal supernaturals because I disliked the human they’d killed. Then Lisa did something no heroine should ever do; despite sensing the place reeked of wrongness, Lisa went into the basement of her ex-boyfriend’s parents’ house. Of course, I knew she had to do that; that’s the kind of novel ‘Crossings‘ is, but what she found there shocked me. From that point on, the novel moved from suspense to horror, and I knew I was in for a wild ride.
I liked that, even with the supernatural elements of the story in the forefront, Ashley Capes kept the narrative grounded in reality and used that reality to increase the tension. When Lisa is knee-deep in bloody, scary weirdness and the prime suspect in multiple murder cases, her situation worsens when a huge wildfire sweeps through the small town.
I also liked that not everything was neatly explained and labelled by the end of the book. Lisa still wasn’t sure of how much of what she saw was real, although the body count was unarguable. This appealed to me because what she’d been through was wild and inexplicable; explaining it would have been like attributing a motive to a wildfire.
I’ll be reading more of Ashley Capes’ work. I’ve added ‘City of Masks‘ (2014), the first book in his six-book Bone Mask fantasy series, to my TBR pile.
