Ana is a strange girl, a loner and the product of her dysfunctional family. She has only one friend – her elderly dog River, who is dying. Ana is waiting for the day when River will need to be put down, and on that day, she intends to take her own life. She believes no-one will miss her and spends much of her time at the local pharmacy, where she works part-time, scheming how to get the opiates she needs for her suicide.

One day she has an odd encounter with a woman in a white van, who is later found murdered. She is greatly disturbed by the murder and, when going home that night, she encounters a strange man in the woods near her house sleeping in a white van. Fearing him to be the murder, she runs him down while trying to flee from him and knocks him out. Panicking about what she has done, rather than report the matter to the police, she takes him to her home, drugs him with the opiates she has stolen and shackles him while she ponders what to do. Is he the murderer? He denies it vehemently, but she is sure of it.

In reading this I was immediately reminded of John Fowles’s masterpiece The Collector, but this does not have the strength of that great and chilling novel. Ana is an unreliable narrator but as a plot device in this book, it’s not particularly effective. The story is set in Tasmania but there is no real sense of place, nor do we get that frisson of claustrophobia that should come from a tale of imprisonment. The novel is somewhat creepy but is also seemingly aimless – the reader is really unsure what Ana hopes to achieve by her actions, and is left feeling somewhat unsatisfied.

Reviewed by Lesley West