From its incendiary opening to its gut punch ending, Mali Cornish’s THE MISSING MOTHER is a thriller you won’t want to miss.
There’s something wrong in Geelong, with the boarding schools and scabby bus kids, the waterfront and the oil refinery. Everything was uneven, out of kilter, cracking in the middle. Elspeth fled the town in her late teens and found a foothold in journalism in New York.
Now decades later, she has returned to Geelong due to the disappearance of her mother, Simone. Here she is reunited with her sister, Aoife, in a quest to discover what happened to their mother – missing person or murder victim.
Almost upon arrival, Elspeth wants to retreat. “In an ideal world, I would go to the airport now, book in for the next flight and sleep on the plane, waking up far away from Geelong and its grotesques, its ghosts, its memories”.
It is these grotesques, ghosts and memories that pervade and haunt the unsettling narrative of THE MISSING MOTHER, vestiges of unresolved childhood trauma feeding into a sequence of unease.
Elspeth and Aoife had a bohemian upbringing, their mother, Simone, muse to the artist, Robert Frank, their father. Their parents relationship was volatile and passionate yet functional until a rupture resembling a Rasputinesque scenario sends it into spiral.
Robert comes under the influence of a charismatic Catholic priest; a perceived enlightenment for him a plunge into darkness for his wife and daughters.
Simone in no uncertain, very acerbic style notes “Catholics are looking for any excuse for a Mass, they are like American greeting card companies, always in search for a new holiday around which they can package capitalism’s best excesses but their product is hell and damnation.”
There is something rotten in the city land-marked by the steeple of St. Mary of the Angels Basilica. The cops are suspicious of the prodigal’s return and a local crime reporter is keen to cop a scoop, if not a feel.
Long lost letters, Simone’s missing memoir manuscript, a backyard septic tank and relationships past and present turned toxic turbo charge THE MISSING MOTHER into a most unsettling tale, with a damaged and unreliable narrator who see-saws from sleuth to suspect.
As in the Elvis Presley song, Edge of Reality, Elspeth walks a thin line where dark shadows follow as she skirts the borderline of doom where life’s dreams lie disillusioned.
In style, content and character, Mali Cornish accomplishes a delicious ambiguity that dares you to read on.
THE MISSING MOTHER by Mali Cornish is published by Atlantic Books.
