Click
by Sarah Bailey
Allen & Unwin
Before Brian Pocock took the job of monitoring incoming ‘hot tips’ at Melbourne’s largest newspaper, he wasn’t fully aware of how many nutty people there were in the world; how much weird shit actually happened; and how many people wanted to share it with the media.
Warning: This review contains mention of violence and sexual assault.
Receiving a photo of “victim #2 just after her death” via a bogus Instagram account was unexpected, as he didn’t know that police had already found photo #1 with the body of a young Swedish backpacker.
Inspired in part by the Zodiac killer, an unidentified American serial killer in the late sixties who famously taunted authorities and the media, Sarah Bailey’s crime fiction gives the minute-by-minute account of instantaneous news in the hunt to find the killer.
Rookie detective Pen Kibbs, who is in the thick of the investigation, finds that she has to dive into exploring the dark web. Journalist Olive ‘Oli’ Groves, whose fledgling digital news site Newsday has just started to get noticed, is also in the thick of it.
Oli receives the photo of another missing woman lying in a pool of blood from an unknown number on her phone. The media are hungry for information and the serial killer is obviously seeking notoriety, but it is distressingly real.
While genuinely distraught by the violence inflicted on young women and the threat the attacker is to the community, more and more people “inhale every detail they can find, then wait for new information to drop so they can analyse and debate it.” Certainly an accurate judgemental observation on our news-hungry society.
As the bodies mount up, there is not a skerrick of information about the killer or the motivation for the seemingly random murders. No answers are given into what makes a garden-variety abuser into a mass murderer.
Apart from an overriding outrage about the scourge of domestic violence and abuse being a common thread, the narrative is more concerned with the effect that the crimes are having on those charged with solving and reporting them.
That’s the point. Many of the main characters have experienced violence – sexually abused by a family member, choked on a date or blackmailed with sexually explicit videos filmed without consent. It is only when bodies are discovered that the rest of society seems to take an interest.
Lezly Herbert
