Serial killers often flew under the radar. They were the good guys, the nice guys whom neighbours had no idea about. A teacher, a choirmaster.
Ruth-Ann Baker is haunted by the ghost of her best friend in Jacqueline Bublitz's much-awaited second book, Leave the Girls Behind.
When Ruth was seven years old, Beth Lovely was abducted from a park in Hoben, Connecticut and murdered by Ethan Oswald - a local high-school teacher; a man hailed as a model citizen until he made 'one mistake'.
Convinced that Beth wasn't Oswald's only 'mistake', as a teenager Ruth trawled the internet for answers, discovering victims of unsolved murders that fit both the location and Oswald's methods.
Ruth seems tuned into these unacknowledged girls' presence and becomes fixated on bringing their deaths into the light to find justice for these girls whose cases were never solved: girls on the fringes of society, less likely to be missed by family or more likely to be in harm's way. These victims are known in police circles as the 'less dead'.
Had he used other girls as practice and, because they were 'less dead', the police had failed to see these dots, let alone connect them?
Persuaded by family and trauma counsellors, Ruth leaves her obsession with the girls in the past to get on with her life. Until, in her mid-twenties, news of seven-year-old Coco Wilson's disappearance floods the internet.
He didn't seem like a stranger.
This time Ruth's amateur investigations online lead to more girls left behind in Ethan's wake: 'silent victims' - girls who grew up to be women in Oswald's orbit. Who grew up to be women married to serial killers.
The circular motif of Carousel, the musical produced by Oswald, a music teacher, is mirrored both in the structure of the story, and in the violent nature of the relationships examined by it.
What if Ethan's legacy lived on after his death? Could Ruth have found a pattern, noted but dismissed, of the abuse and manipulation of Ethan's Julie Jordans - the young women who played his leading ladies? Could these women lead Ruth to Coco Wilson? Or is Ruth, in her search for closure and understanding, barking up the wrong tree completely?
Helen Halvorsen: "We ask a lot of young women, don't we? I was still a teenager when I was expected to know what would be best for the rest of my life. I went straight from my father's house to Martin's, both metaphorically and literally. When I got married, I had never spent a single night on my own. It's different for your generation, but that was life back then. We were our men."
Ruth: "Juno, your dad acted in a way lots of men have...He's part of a long line of males who have tried to solve their problems the exact same way: by taking them out on other people. A big part of talking to a woman like your mom is trying to understand how an otherwise 'normal' guy... could do such terrible things."
Fixated, Ruth invents a podcast, The Other Women, to try to lure the Julie Jordans out of the woodwork. So begins a dangerous mission across the globe to find out the answers to Ruth's questions.
"Mostly, Ruth feels like she exists in a liminal space, perpetually at the threshold of what is remembered and what is forgotten. ...Hecate moved smoothly between these spaces, between times, between states of being, when all Ruth feels is stuck at the edge of things."
A sense of the supernatural pervades Leave the Girls Behind; the idea of victims stuck in a liminal space with Ruth moving between, like a modern version of Hecate.
This motif echoes the narrative angle of Jacqui Bublitz' first book, Before You Knew My Name, where the victim tells her own story. The innovation turns the usual treatment of murder mysteries on its head. In traditional thrillers the victim is denied a narrative voice, while the murderer reaps infamy. Much like real life.
Before You Knew My Name scooped the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel and Best First Novel in 2022. Can Bublitz keep up the momentum?
There are more than a few characters to keep track of in this story and many threads to the story. Some lead to dead ends, but others move in a circular fashion to fill in the gaps like synapses forming in the brain, or links on a website. This could go either way for Bublitz, leaving the reader confused or in the presence of genius. I'm leaning towards the latter.
"The girl you were can never be left behind."
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