What Caz Read

A group of friends, who have known each other for years, band together to buy an idyllic piece of land in the bush, complete with an abandoned pub. They plan to use the land as a place to escape from their busy lives in the city and give the children a chance to connect to nature without the distraction of modern technology.

On their first weekend camping, also a working weekend to build toilets and clear away blackberries, someone ends up dead and those who know about it decide not to tell those who don’t, adding to the ever growing list of secrets the adults are keeping from each other.

This was a page turner! From the opening chapter there was an undercurrent of tension that slowly built and as the friendship group was gradually fractured by secrets and the weekend started to slip out of their control the sense of menace increased.

There were quite a few characters in this book but the subplots and different POVs were easy to follow and I really enjoyed how each chapter revealed a little more about the friends and their personalities – and how thoroughly unlikeable they all were!

The Australian bush setting added to the eerie nature of the story with its abandoned mines, strange two-headed deer and overgrown graves.

The Hiding Place has numerous secondary themes, such as parenting, climate change and politics, but moral quandaries and hypocrisy are the beating heart of this book. When the situation can no longer be controlled and their plans begin to unravel the adults are forced to face the consequences of their actions.

The short chapters alternating between POVs and ample secrets will keep you invested in this morally complex literary fiction right up to the satisfying conclusion!

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Publisher: Scribner Australia.
Format: Paperback, 320 pages
ISBN: 978-1761429057

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Here’s the synopsis

They’re good people. Why shouldn’t they get what they deserve?

When Lou sees an ad for a long-abandoned mining town up for sale, it doesn’t take her long to convince her sister and their oldest friends to go in on the idyllic property buried in the bush – a place where the four families can hide away on weekends, get back to nature and unstick the kids from their screens.

But things start to go wrong before they even arrive for their first camping trip – a rogue deer sends a trailer off the road, a neighbour complains about the fence line and squatters have set up camp down by the river. Soon none of that will matter, though, because by the end of the first night someone will be dead.

At first it seems that hiding a body is easier than keeping other sorts of secrets: a lost job, an illegal crop, an outrageous affair, a little embezzlement. But what’s buried has a way of coming to the surface, and even in the bush, it’s hard to remain unseen.