The Body Next Door

Whatever it is you've come to expect from a Zane Lovitt novel, forget it, this is an author who appears not care one jot for expectations. He appears, instead to care about writing wonderful, engaging characters of amazing variety.

His first novel, THE MIDNIGHT PROMISE, introduced John Dorn. Classic gumshoe, his woman has left him, he lives in the office, drinks too much, and specialises in lost causes, hopeless cases, the underdogs and the oppressed. As noted in the blurb - he was drawn to them  “as a sledgehammer is to a kneecap.” Hardboiled, dark noir short stories.

Then BLACK TEETH, which had some of the dry darkness of the earlier novel, but bought to us Jason Ginaff, an anxious man who works from home, researching job candidates, whilst running a dedicated side project looking for his own father. Which leads him to get mixed up with somebody else looking for the same man, only Rudy wants to kill Jason's dad. Populated this time by likeable and unlikable characters there was a sly, dry sense of humour at the back of this novel in particular.

Which is, now that I come to think of it, a similarity (and I'm digging deep here) between that last novel and the current one - THE BODY NEXT DOOR. The tagline for this one is "Glorious suburbia ... a romantic diary ... two accidental sleuths", which should not, for a moment make you think cosy. It's not. It's populated with mostly pretty likeable characters, sure, it's a classic little closed off suburban street called Carnation Way, tucked away in the suburbs of Melbourne, full of houses with gardens out the front, cars parked on the street, kids playing, people popping in and out of each other's houses. and a surprising body count given the ordinariness of it all.

There are some families in this street with a lot going on. Young Jamie, has moved back in with his Dad Bruce, who is starting to show rapidly increasing signs of dementia - setting fire to the kitchen being the big red flag. But it kind of worked out okay for Jamie, his marriage was imploding anyway, and he loves his Dad, his odd ways, and the community he grew up in. There's still people here from when he was younger, and it feels, safe, and very normal. If you ignore the discovery of a dead young man under the neighbouring house years ago, and the sad and odd death of George. Much of which could be put down to bad luck, until the night that Claire Corral disappeared.

Claire's lived in Carnation Way for a very long time, long enough to have been there when young Lachlan's body was found, to have known Jamie's Mum Holly before she died, his dad when he was still teaching, and Yasmin before the twins were born, George when he discovered Lachlan's body, and everybody and everything else. Born in England, she'd moved to Australia with her first husband, but the marriage had imploded (Solly was a bit of a sod), and she's now got a new partner. And the reader knows all of this as chapters that make up Claire's diary form part of the narrative, going back over the years, talking about the time the body was found, suspicions and resolutions, and not quite enough detail to explain why she's now vanished, but more than enough hints to suggest she might have known quite a bit.

Yasmin is one of Claire's best friends, with twin boys, a busy career and an ex-con-ex-husband who was a real snake in the grass, until Claire saw him off. George on the other hand had been a harmless, kind old Greek man who unfortunately smelt something odd from the house next door, and then, after the trauma of finding Lachlan's dead body, died tragically in a car accident on the Great Ocean Road, one of those weird bits of irony that happen, given he had been the driving instructor who taught all the kids how to drive. Mind you, nobody ever did really fully explain how it was that somebody, unknown to all of them, ended up getting murdered under a house in a quiet little St Albans street.

The contents of Claire's diaries would have have been useful for Jamie to know as Tessa moves into the house where Lachlan's body was found, and the connections between her and Claire come to light, about the same time that Jamie starts to feel a bit like life might be worth living again, only what is Tessa really up to, and what do the ramblings of a demented old man actually mean? And why on earth would somebody as "normal" and everyday as Claire just vanish like that?

Told with enormous affection and a gentle, almost kind regard for his characters, Lovitt has this time served up a cast of characters who might have some deadly secrets, but in the main are pretty "ordinary". The major darkness in this novel turns out to be the blinkered viewpoints that have persisted, and those crawl spaces under all those houses. Turns out that glorious suburbia is only glorious when you keep those blinkers firmly taped to the side of your head. Because taking them off gives Jamie and Bruce a whole different outlook.