Kirsten McDougall

A psychological suspense novel with touches of paranormal, TESS is a beautifully balanced, chilling, claustrophobic and clever novel.

Set in small town New Zealand, at the turn of the millennium, TESS is, as the blurb puts it "a gothic love story about the ties that bind and tear a family apart." It's also a story of how rewarding an unlikely friendship can be, and about the power of connecting with the other. It's about reaching out to somebody for the sake of kindness, contact and being a show more human being in a world that sometimes seems committed to the other direction.

The writing in TESS is excellent, the flashbacks, the special powers / paranormal elements all flow into the rest of the story in a manner that never makes them seamless, and all the more believable because of that. The strength of TESS is not in overt messaging, but the nuance of depiction. There's violence and hate and plenty of threat here, but it's skilfully portrayed, never contrived, never manipulative. The threat is implied, the violence explored by consequence rather than actuality.

TESS is stark vivid, deep, contemplative, different and extremely rewarding reading.

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She's a Killer by Kirsten McDougall

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was on my TBR lists for so long! It’s exactly the sort of thing that is right up my street – dark humour, a touch of speculative fiction (climate fiction in this case, cli-fi if you will) and a slightly unhinged protagonist. Also, this is written by a New Zealand author and set in New Zealand which is fun, I usually enjoy a bit of Kiwi humour.

Well, this is funny and I did enjoy Alice’s POV. She’s kind of bitchy and show more manipulative, and unhinged to the degree that she has a full imaginary friend. She’s got a genius-level IQ but she’s wasted her potential in crappy jobs, and now in her late thirties that is starting to weigh on her. When the hot rich guy she hooks up with dumps his fifteen-year-old daughter on her, with a fat stack of cash for her trouble, it shakes up her life in more ways than one.

I also really enjoyed (maybe not enjoyed, was terrified this is far too possible) the future world where the planet is fucked, a bottle of beer costs $30 and all the rich people (wealthugees) are buying their way into New Zealand. The majority of the population barely scrapes by with food prices astronomically high and the infrastructure is going to shit, meanwhile the rich build themselves walled-off green paradises.

This did start strong but once Erika’s secret was revealed it all quickly fell apart for me. That plot felt very juvenile (and full of holes), but maybe I could have gone with it if I felt like the novel had anything to say. I got to the end of it and just thought “What was the point of any of this?” Alice didn’t seem to have grown or learned anything, and nothing had significantly changed. If anything, everything is now even worse in her life. There are a lot of dangling threads of potential and I think this could have worked if the writing and the character dynamics (especially with her mother) had been sharper.

Ironically this whole novel to me was like Alice’s genuis IQ – wasted potential! Maybe that was the point…?

It reminds me of Pretend I’m Dead by Jen Beagin, which is better and much more memorable than this.

Read this review and more on my blog .

# REVIEW SUMMARY
## I LIKED
- It’s dark and funny, and it did make me laugh.
- The climate-fiction element felt timely and grimly plausible.
- I enjoyed Alice as a character.

## I DIDN’T LIKE
- It just didn’t go anywhere and I have no idea what the point was.

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Billed as a thriller, SHE'S A KILLER a bit more than just that. It's social commentary, a look at outsiders, and, importantly, a chilling insight into what could easily be happening in a few years in a lot of places, with people priced out of water availability, food at a premium, and populations hamstrung by corrupt governments. In fact, now that I write that, it doesn't feel quite as futuristic as you might think.

https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/shes-killer-kirsten-mcdougall

I was a bit flummoxed when a weird and funny novel about a fairly awful slacker in near-future Wellington turned into a thriller about radicals assassinating climate refugees without really changing tone. Amusingly the protagonist works in the enrolment office at Victoria University, where I once worked myself, but not much overlap with my recollections. This was hyped as a possible Ockham winner, and I guess it's good, but the dramatic climax didn't really work for me.