Antipodean author Jacqueline Bublitz, who’s split her life between Taranaki and Melbourne, sent tremors through parts of the book world with her trope-busting debut, Before You Knew My Name, a feminist literary thriller that explored an all-too-typical ‘murdered women found in a NYC park’ story from victim and bystander perspectives.

Acclaim, sales and awards flowed, including General Fiction Book of the Year at the ABIAs, and double-ups at the crime-loving Davitts and Ngaio Marsh Awards. How do you follow that? Well, now Bublitz is back with a fascinating new stand-alone that rakes over some similar ground – true crime obsession and the wider impact of misogynistic murders – while being its own story.

In Leave the Girls Behind, New York bartender Ruth-Ann Baker is on high alert after a young girl goes missing from her home town in Connecticut. Awful memories stir of Ruth-Ann’s best friend, Beth, being abducted and murdered by a popular teacher, Ethan Oswald, almost twenty years before. Ruth-Ann always felt Oswald had more victims, but he died in prison. Was there an accomplice?

As Ruth-Ann is driven by ghostly girls to try to uncover the truth, Bublitz takes readers on a journey across the globe, from New York to New Zealand to Norway. But is our unreliable narrator trying to help a missing girl now, ones from the past, or herself? A tale about the messy ripples cast by violence and fear. Like Marmite, its taste lingers.

Reviewed by Craig Sisterson

Read a book review of Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz

Read a Q&A with Jacqueline Bublitz