Liars, James O'Loghlin

Don't be put off by LIARS by James O'Loghlin. It's a biggish book at 464 pages, but it fills that size admirably. Engaging, addictive, and intriguing, it's small town setting is used to build a complex story, with personalities, connections, backgrounds and people that are anything but.

Set in the fictional location of Bullford Point, a seaside town on the NSW Central Coast that seems very real. Quaint and slow paced, it's facing big changes with a major real estate development planned, and tension between incomers and long-term residents; and those long-term residents and some who have returned to their home town with big ideas. 

There's a group of core characters in LIARS, all of whom are connected via their pasts, and the present. Karen Kemp's an incomer, recently partnered with a long term local, she's got a past that has lead to an upcoming court case that she's very worried about. Behind her boyfriend's back, she's hooked up with returned long-term local Joe Griffiths. Recently released from jail Joe was a hopeless drug addict who is looking to turn his life around. 

When Karen's body is found in the nearby bush, and Joe dies from a supposed overdose, incoming police from Sydney are more than happy to write the whole thing off as murder suicide and return to their city lives. Local cop, Seb Baxter, egged on by handywoman and employer of Joe, Barb, isn't convinced. Barb found Joe's body, and there were clues at the crime scene that don't add up to suicide.

Which is where the backstories and connections in this novel start to come into play. Joe was part of a group of friends, his brother Viv, Seb the cop, Sal, Gary, Dev and Leanne. They all grew up together, formed a band that Dev managed, moved to Sydney for university, and were going to take the music world by storm. They were weathering love triangles, unrequited desire, drugs, and just starting to get somewhere, when Sal, lead singer and main songwriter, upped and left. She'd moved to the Blue Mountains and after a period of complete silence, as she was starting to reach out again to the others, she became the third victim of a serial killer in the area, an unknown offender who strangled three women in their own homes, Sal being the third and final.

Joe's return home and desire to remain clean had gotten him a job with Barb, whilst he worked on a podcast going back over Sal's death - hoping once and for all to prove who the Blue Mountains strangler was. His death leaves the remaining members of his friendship group with issues of their own to deal with, and Barb and Seb determined to get to the real truth, despite what the Sydney homicide squad thinks.

LIARS, for all the nicely twisty and complex plot at its heart, is really character based fiction, with Barb the unlikely central focus. She's dealing with the betrayal of her ex-husband, who has left her for a much younger woman, but this doesn't read as a lost woman looking to fill a void. Barb's more of a persistent force of nature than that, she's beguiling, she's determined and, most importantly, she's not really a judgemental woman. She knows what Joe had become, she's aware of Leanne's own struggles with drugs, Viv's neurological differences that have made him an efficient but unempathetic lawyer, Seb's timidity despite his chosen profession, Gary's bravado (he's a standup comedian and TV game show host now) and the reasons for real estate developer Dev's pushiness. It's hard not to suspect that Barb sees a bit of herself in each of these people - that she's known since they were kids. She's also, belatedly, not a push over and her self-confidence and self-care grows, as she and Seb dig and delve and think long and hard about what they see, hear and learn. It doesn't hurt that she's a dab hand at baking as well - it's amazing what you can achieve with a potentially violent standover man and banana bread...

In the first part of LIARS, largish sections of the story are told via transcripts of the podcast, text messages, emails and even letters between various characters. These filled in a lot of the background and gave the action / activities context although there were points where they did seem to slow things down a little. Get past that and the plot gallops along with two major timelines, leading up to Sal's disappearance and the current, woven together elegantly. 

As odd as it seems, there may well be a connection between a serial killer years ago, and the death of two mostly unconnected people in the current day. Or there may not be. There could be a limited list of potential suspects, or it could be unlimited. It might be down to drugs, it could be because of events in the past, or it could all be unconnected. There are clues dotted along the way, there are a few convenient discoveries and there's a hell of a surprise at the end. Even if, by then, the reader is contemplating what might have lead to the death of Sal, and the trickle down that came to current day Bullford Point, it's a rollercoaster of an ending.