Allen & Unwin, Australia 2026
Cover design Christabella Designs
Cover images Silas Manhood/Trevillion; iStock; Shutterstock
The brooding presence of the now overgrown and dilapidated manor at Thornwood Park is the setting for much of this novel, and a stark metaphor for decay and decline, for the buried past.
The doughty Rose McHugh is left a bequest as director of the Southern Highlands Historical Museum, by the last of owner of Thornwood, the reclusive Judith Longworth. Having always been fascinated by the house and the stories swirling around it, Rose is delighted to be able to rummage about looking for items of historical significance.
What she finds, however, is something oddly out of place for such a once wealthy family and this sparks her wonderfully curious mind to ask what such things could be doing there and why they were kept.
A vestige of evidence points her to a group of young women from the Women’s Auxiliary, Australian Air Force, who have gone missing during World War 11 and whose absences have gone uninvestigated, unrecorded and unexplained.
Parallels with famous serial killers immediately suggest themselves and Rose plunges into the darkness of the past’s secrets, as we have come to expect – with little caution or concern for her own safety. It is this that we especially love about Rose – she is a woman who values the past and its stories, who is a curious thinker and a determined justice warrior. She is motivated by such goodness.
Themes of the wielding of power, the perpetually lower status of women, the blindness of the law (and hence injustice) when applied to the rich and powerful and the human tendency to judgementalism are woven through the plot strands both major and minor. Our increasing capacity to trace our lineage also gets a nod here as it has done in previous Rose McHugh investigations.
Rose finds herself fighting on several fronts as she tries to unearth the mysteries of Thornwood and simultaneously to help her friend George, who is being abused by his grasping daughter Madeleine. A change to Rose’s domestic situation occurs when her sister Kim is forced to come and live with her when in pecuniary difficulties.
And people in high places are clearly doing their utmost to stop Rose from prying into the Longworth family story, leading to her dismissal from the Museum. She’s struggling under a barrage of difficulties, and briefly falls prey to a very understandable human frailty and sense of despair.
However, this very fact of being at her lowest ebb soon works in Rose’s favour with allies in unexpected places coming to the fore when most needed.
That the power of nature, of the pre-colonial bush, is consuming the interloping manor house and cultivated garden is significant. Rose’s chosen home in the Southern Highlands of NSW provides the author (and Rose, of course) with evidence of a powerful, ancient heritage, well pre-dating the settler stories often featured in the regional museum.
With the historian’s determination to speak for the forgotten, Rose boldly peels back the layers of ‘civilisation’ and gentility, and hacks her way metaphorically and in reality through the wild brush, steadfastly promoting the stories of strong women like Charlotte (Atkinson) Barton, and determinedly seeking long overdue justice for the disappeared and the wronged.
I await Rose’s next adventures with eagerness despite my concerns for her safety and wellbeing. There I will have to place my trust in Joan Sauers to keep her safe in the end.
Thank you to Allen & Unwin for my review copy and to Joan for speaking to me about the sort of crimes explored in this novel, and the importance of history, especially the untold stories of our society – and for indulging my deep affection for Rose McHugh.