Shot, Shelley Burr

What influencers reveal to the public can look idyllic, but as Shelley Burr’s new thriller shows, the reality can be very different.

Dahlia and Duncan Crews are lifestyle influencers. Rich, famous, and glamorous, they share their perfect lives – and that of their perfect daughter, Karma – in their perfect mansion near Byron Bay with massive numbers of online subscribers, their every move and product plug closely followed.

‘Hurry up the stream’s starting,’ his sister hollered from the lounge room.

He picked up his drink and wandered in, feigning disinterest. ‘The Crews family go live all the time, I don’t see what’s so interesting about this one.’

‘Apparently they have some big announcement,’ she said. …

On the television the Family Crews stood in their lounge room wearing oversized hoodies.

At least it is, until the day Dahlia and Duncan are shot dead, witnessed live by 90,000 of their followers. Their teenage daughter, Karma (Kammy), was seen leaving the room just before a calm, controlled figure dressed in a black tracksuit, balaclava and ski goggles appeared on camera for just a few moments, killing the couple and calmly walking away – not only from the livestream, but from a secluded house equipped with surveillance cameras.

Despite the incredibly public nature of it all, the case was never solved, although Karma has always been seen as the prime suspect. A lack of clear motivation or even opportunity in the very tight timeframe means that she’s never been charged with any crime.

‘To a fringe contingent, it’s suspicious that Karma escaped unharmed when her parents were both killed.’

Six years later, true-crime vlogger Jennifer ‘Jen’ Benedetta has a lot on her plate when a contact out of the blue drags her straight into the Crews family mystery. A production company has sold a lifestyle show with Kammy Crews as the host, and now there’s some serious disquiet around the show based on all the rumours and suspicion.

At this point readers will find that things start to get a bit complicated. Jen’s precarious financial position is initially hinted at, then slowly expanded to reveal what she thinks about the death of her sister Jade and her lack of access to her much-loved nephew, which has resulted in a defamation action that is costing her a fortune to defend. Her comfortable lifestyle has rapidly degenerated into effective homelessness and a mounting financial debt to her parents, which she has no idea how she will pay back. Meaning the generous terms offered by the production company to do a documentary on the Crews case seem like manna from heaven, and are the reason she doesn’t ask too many difficult questions about the circumstances of the assignment.

Interrobang Productions was a genuine company. They were small, but serious. They’d made a miniseries adaptation of Seven Little Australians she’d sort of watched while recovering from a hangover on New Year’s Day. True crime didn’t seem to be their beat, but Jen hadn’t been able to identify a clear brand from scrolling through their list of productions. Maybe they were still experimenting.

Setting up in Byron with old friend and colleague Paige to assist her, Jen is working within the very tight timeframe set by Interrobang, with the added complication that the brief is really to prove Kammy is innocent. The two women are also startled to discover the luxurious, secluded accommodation with picture-postcard views rented for them; it’s not what they had been expecting, even before really strange things start to happen there.

The room beyond was a lounge room. It was above average in size and comfortably furnished. It would have seemed like any other entertaining space if Jen hadn’t seen it in her laptop screen so recently.

‘They rented us the actual house where the murders happened.’

Looking back through many hours of filmed moments from the Crews family’s lives, and starting out interviewing Kammy, then the aunt who took Kammy in after the murders, and the many people connected to them both, Jen eventually starts to realise there is something very odd about this family and their ‘open for all to see’ lives. There are mysteries within mysteries, strings being pulled from a lot of sides, and questionable stories everywhere she turns. As Paige deals with complications in her own life, a foster dog is taken on for protection and friendship (happily returned to his own family at the end), and the treasure trove they thought they had – the past life of the Crews family recorded in raw, unedited form – turns out to be a window into the darkness that very few people realised was there.

All through Shot there are layers and hidden moments. There are so many mysteries that affect so many characters that, while a lot has changed in the six years between the shooting of her parents and where Kammy is now, there are shadows lurking behind every interaction, and real presences in the darker corners of their lives as well as in the garden and the house.

The complicated story of the family, their connections, and their pasts slowly reveals itself as the ‘influencer’ façade falters, falling away to reveal a murky reality not that far from the surface. Whilst it might seem that a double murder, on camera, streamed to so many people, is a very big, very loud way of cracking that surface, it turns out that determined, careful sleuthing is the real key. As are some very difficult moral and legal questions, decisions that oddly may not affect Kammy as much as they do Jen’s and Paige’s own lives.

As you’d expect from a story that’s all about influence and product placement, the truth, when it is finally revealed, is packaged, tailored and edited for release in a manner that’s confronting because it’s understandable. At the same time, Jen’s success in solving this unsolvable murder turns her thoughts back to the unresolved story behind her sister’s death. Truth is a pretty good defence in cases of defamation, after all.