This clever novel brings cosy crime to Australia

CRIME FICTION
It Takes a Town
Aoife Clifford
Ultimo Press, $34.99

The regional town of Welcome would like to be a city, given it sports a cathedral. Undercutting this grand ambition is the fact that as a middle-sized town, it’s also small enough to have fostered a close-knit community in which everyone knows everyone else’s business. This will prove useful since, according to Welcome’s home-rown elderly sleuth, Janet Ross, “it takes a town to solve a murder”. And so it does.

This is a clever crime novel that manages to tick a slew of subgenre boxes while never losing sight of the imperative to keep the story moving. In the wry observations of Welcome and its inhabitants, for example, Aoife Clifford initially leans towards the cosy. In the best Midsomer tradition, it all begins with a gala in the dilapidated Palais Theatre starring Welcome’s former child star, Vanessa Walton, who made her entrance onto the world stage “tap-dancing across a giant biscuit sprinkling sugar into the air”.

The career-hardened, now middle-aged Vanessa is back in Welcome to raise money for her cousin’s cancer cause. And then Vanessa is found dead at the bottom of the stairs, having apparently tripped during a power outage after consuming half a bottle of champagne.

So there’s a police procedural element too. We meet the shrewd Sergeant Carole Duffy flying in on a helicopter to take up her new posting and manage the aftermath of a flood, and now a body. Also on the flight is aspiring politician and local property developer Barton Langridge, who drove back to the city the night before with the sole purpose of arriving with the police as a publicity stunt for the cameras. Carole is not impressed.

There are also shades of domestic noir involving teacher Frankie Birnam and her family. Frankie was once best friends with Veronica and is still besties with Mer (short for Meredith). Mer’s now eking out her bored existence in the local supermarket, snaffling quiches and doing her best to antagonise the manager while drinking on the sly. Mer’s fun.

Frankie, meanwhile, is still married to her high-school sweetheart, Joe, with whom she has two boys, the elder of whom is friends with Jaz and Brianna. The latter are climate activist teenagers at Frankie’s school and clearly up to something. Indeed, every member of this fictional community is somehow involved in Vanessa’s death. As Frankie observes while watching Vanessa performing on stage at the fundraising gala, “she was a star, a giant supernova, and everyone in the room was spinning in her orbit” – even after her death, apparently.

It Takes a Town is enlivened by nice observations. Welcome’s would-be Miss Marple, Janet, is described as having the gaze of “a curious owl”, which, given her nocturnal habits, is apposite. Billy, the ageing constable, is described in cop terms as having “put his pool cue back in the rack”. But people are full of surprises and should never be taken for granted.