A Child's Book Of True Crime

Description

'Quietly, I closed the classroom door. I bent to lock it, and a shudder ran through me. In the door's olive paintwork, two words were now scratched in a maniac's hand: I KNOW.' In a small town near Port Arthur in Tasmania in the mid-nineties, Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father of her most gifted student. As the young teacher's sexual life is awakened by the father in scenes of escalating eroticism, the guilt she feels towards the son is compounded. Meanwhile, Veronica, her lover's wife, has just published MURDER AT BLACK SWAN POINT, a true crime book about the brutal slaying of a young adulteress some years before, set in a nearby town. Kate becomes fixated on the unsolved crime of passion that occured years earlier, less and less aware of her own reputation in the present. Is it her imagination, or is someone stalking her? Is she caught playing a game where she no longer knows the rules? Has her obsession with the crime aligned her fate with that of the murdered adulteress? Chilling, erotic and rivetingly suspenseful, A CHILD'S BOOK OF TRUE CRIME marks the arrival of a powerful and startlingly original new voice.

Awards

Shortlisted for NSW Premier's Literary Award Christina Stead Prize for Fiction 2003 and Sisters in Crime's Davitt Awards: Best Adult Novel 2003 and Victorian Premier's Literary Award - Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction 2002.

Author description

Chloe Hooper was born in 1973 and educated at the University of Melbourne and Columbia University New York, where she studied creative writing. A CHILD'S BOOK OF TRUE CRIME is her first novel. Chloe lives in Melbourne.