Affirm Press, Australia 2026
Cover design Deb Parry
The Writers Retreat is a clever work with almost an ‘insiders’ feel to it. Anyone who has anything to do with the writing and publishing world or who has ventured on a writing retreat will find that it strikes chords.
Following the huge success of her first novel, a romance based on the lives of her parents, Kat Hale (pen-named Katerina Harper) finds herself in hole.
Her publisher rejects the follow up romance as boring and unbelievable. Licking her wounds and with two weeks to come up with a rewrite, Kat manages to get a last minute place at Le Writers Retreat in Provence.
The retreat is run by couple Helen, a writer, and Gabriel, a chef, and takes place in Gabriel’s family home, a suitably romantic and romanticised country house in the South of France. What could be better to inspire Kat and shift the doldrums.
She joins the usual mixed bag of attendees at such events – writers, aspiring writers and people with other agendas. She is determined to keep both her success and her failure a secret and settles into the life of the retreat with a less than inspired writing impetus and a lot of insecurity.
As readers, we follow Kat’s progress via her journal, the one piece of writing she is confident to do each day. At the same time, a novella Nom de Plume both charts Kat’s curiosity about the retreat’s personnel and records the daily events from Helen’s point of view. There is sleight of hand here for the author, and a tricky path keeping all the time frames in place to avoid anachronisms or revelations.
It transpires that Helen’s first book may have been plagiarised and Kat quickly switches to amateur detective mode to unearth the truth. Furthermore, it seems that Helen is experiencing the same sort of ‘dry’ as Kat, and there is talk of publishing a cookbook based on Gabriel’s grandmother’s recipes. Trouble is brewing along with the bouillebaisse.
Meanwhile, the actual writing retreat leaders Belinda and Mark are working away in the background on their own agendas, writing and other, and things quickly become murky as secrets are revealed. This applies not just to the retreat managers but to some participants. Very quickly an air of mistrust is conjured, and the formerly bright aspirations of writers are overshadowed by threats of violence, and by secret history and unresolved grief.
The escalation to the dramatic climax is a slow burn and beautifully crafted by the author. The mix of fine dining and crime is a cunning recipe, as is the juxtaposition of the ‘every writer’s dream’ setting and the black deeds of its history and its present.
Victoria Brownlow is a writer fascinated by human psychology. Her portrayal of the people in this book is astute, and both well-observed and well-imagined. We might easily recognise people we have come across in this book’s context – or even perhaps our own traits and behaviours! Here, she clearly demonstrates her capacity to raise issues of contemporary importance, whilst taking us on a winding and complex story of aspiration, ambition, greed and appetite.
Behind the mystery lurk the questions of who can tell a story, who owns stories and how we can ethically lend our own perspective to another’s story. Secrets, image, self-protective behaviour and the writing life all come under the microscope in this engaging crime fiction.
And as much as bleak darkness and ruthless ambition are on show here, so too is the light of hope, love, camaraderie, courage, and willingness to adapt and change.
Thank you to Affirm Press for my review copy, and to Victoria for a very enjoyable conversation about writing, the publishing world and this intriguing and clever mystery/crime novel.