It Takes a Town…To Solve a Murder by Aoife Clifford

Title: It Takes a Town…To Solve a Murder

Author: Aoife Clifford

Genre: Crime

Publisher: Ultimo Press

Published: 3^rd April 2024

Format: Paperback

Pages: 352

Price: $34.99

Synopsis: So many people had reason to hate her, but did anyone have reason to kill her?
 
Everyone dies famous in a country town, but glamorous Vanessa Walton was a shining star. A celebrity since she was a child, Vanessa is back on the front page for all the wrong reasons; after a terrible storm she has been found dead at the bottom of her stairs.
 
At first her death seems to be a simple accident, but anonymous letters are discovered that suggest otherwise – and when 16-year-old Jasmine Langridge claims it is murder, she suddenly disappears. As the police begin to investigate, secrets are exposed and friendships unravel.
 
What happens to a community when murders and abductions sit alongside petty workmates, teenage tribulations and longstanding friendships? It will take a town to solve this crime, but what will be broken in the effort to piece together the truth?

~*~

Vanessa Walton, shining star, is dead. The town of Welcome, a small country town is in shock, but it seems that they are also hiding a lot from everyone. Vanessa has been a celebrity since she was a child, so who has it in for her? Who would push her down the stairs? It’s all up to new cop in town, Sergeant Carole Duffy, to find out. But everyone claims it’s suicide, or an accident caused by the wild storm that occurred the night of Vanessa’s death. So Carole thinks this is going to be simple.

Until anonymous letters start appearing, claiming it was something more. And then, 16-year-Jasmine Langridge, the stepdaughter of local politician, Barton Langridge claims it really is murder, and then she disappears. So Carole has two cases on her hands, so things are about to get a bit more complicated. Especially in a town called Welcome that’s not really all that welcoming after all. Nobody wants to talk. Everybody seems to have secrets, and doesn’t want to help find out what happened. Why? What did they have against Jasmine and her family? What did they have against Vanessa? A community usually comes together in the face of tragedy, but in Welcome, it’s as though everyone is determined not to help.

Small towns are often used in crime fiction because of the isolation they give, and the sense of being cut off in some way from the city. So they almost act like a bit of a closed room mystery in this sense. It can add an extra layer and challenge to the story, a way of making the crime work in a contemporary setting where everything is so reliant on technology, and where crimes can be solved too easily and too quickly by the presence and overreliance on technology. Some people might be willing to help, but who? And what motives does everyone have?

There are lots of trails to follow, lots of threads that need to be tweaked and pulled at throughout this novel. Things like poking fun at how TV dramas make it seem easy, quick and always solvable, whereas it’s more complicated in real life. It’s clever in this sense, because it brings things together well, and moves the story along at a fairly good pace, delivering what we need to know when. At its heart though, it is about ordinary people trying to solve a crime, and what it means when we keep secrets. Secrets that make solving a mystery hard, especially when everyone knows more than they are letting on.

What made this novel work so well for me was that it played with the tropes we all know well, and tried to make them stand out in new and different ways. This is what makes this book work, and it felt like it could be the beginning of a series. It also stood well on its own as a standalone story, so it will be very interesting to see whether or not we get to see more of Welcome or Caroline Duffy. It’s a fun and intriguing book that adds something interesting to the crime genre, and is sure to find readers out there.