The housemate

Australian Bailey, best-selling author of the Gemma Woodstock trilogy--The Dark Lake (2017), Into the Night (2018), and Where the Dead Go (2019)--returns with her first stand-alone thriller. Reporter Olive Groves is no stranger to the Housemate Homicide story. In fact, she covered it nine years ago for Melbourne Today. A Melbourne University woman was found dead in a house share. One roommate went missing, and the other was accused of her murder. What happened to the missing roommate? Nine years later, after the missing roommate turns up dead, Olive is once again assigned to the story. This time she must team up with Cooper Ng, a young podcaster, to solve the nearly decade-old mystery. Dark secrets are revealed that threaten Olive's safety and cause her to recall disturbing memories from her past and question the people closest to her. Bailey explores multiple motives such as drugs, prostitution, and child pornography. Her sophisticated, multilayered plot will have readers longing for more books about this intriguing new leading lady.

In 2005, reporter Oli Groves, the protagonist of this outstanding standalone set in Australia from Bailey (the Gemma Woodstock trilogy), is on the scene in St. Kilda when the police make a grim discovery: the stabbed body of University of Melbourne undergrad Evelyn Stanley in the house she'd shared with two other young women, Nicole Horrowitz, who's disappeared, and Alexandra Riboni. Alexandra, found drenched in blood and holding a knife from which her DNA and bloody fingerprints are recovered, is charged and convicted of Evelyn's murder. In 2015, Groves revisits the case, which has become a cause célèbre after a report that Nicole's body was found hanging from a tree next to a house in a remote community. Oli, who's now engaged to the widower of one of the original investigating officers, dives into the case again, even as her paper, the Melbourne Today, forces her to work on it as a podcast as well as a straight news story. Logical yet surprising plot twists never overwhelm the sophisticated characterizations that make suspending disbelief almost effortless. The judicious use of flashbacks build tension, and the denouement doesn't disappoint. Jane Harper readers will be riveted. (Feb.)