A Child's Book of True Crime

“
A Child’s Book of True Crime
is a disturbing tale of violence, sex, self-interest, and the world children will inherit. It is also a stunning, literate, highly readable debut that combines a taut story and a unique structure . . . . It is [Hooper’s] prowess as a wordsmith, her understanding of narrative devices, and her keen grasp of human psychology that make the book so rewarding.”

—
The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“A brilliant, seductive, and unnerving first novel of sexual betrayal and murder . . . Hooper’s novel is so tightly woven, so sophisticated, so full of sharp psychological truth and complex emotional and sexual life that you really have trouble believing it could be anyone’s first book.”

—Vince Passaro,
O The Oprah Magazine

“A witty and unsettling meditation on innocence and experience.”

—
The New Yorker

“Ironic, moving, full of keen perceptions and striking sentences . . . a tour de force.”

—
The Wall Street Journal

“A striking, ambitious first novel . . . Hooper forces open her material so that it resonates beyond itself, and she does this with . . . curiosity and instinctive grace.”

—Jennifer Egan,
The New York Times Book Review

“Hooper has already found a voice—smart, admirably discomfiting—that makes one eager to see what she’ll do next.”

—Mark Harris,
Entertainment Weekly

“A luscious novel . . . compelling.”

—
The Boston Globe

“A charming, surreal bedtime story about disturbing sex, gruesome murder, and one woman’s attempt to escape into adulthood.”

—
Los Angeles Times

“Its Hitchcockian flavor is sure to appeal to mystery lovers as well as those who prefer their love stories dark and dangerous.”

—
USA Today

“Bless Australian author Chloe Hooper for fashioning a remarkable first novel that dispenses with typical hankie-wringing and finger-pointing and goes straight for the visceral response.
A Child’s Book of True Crime
teems with psychological nuance that
tiptoes out to the razor’s edge with bristling vocabulary and spooky lyricism to match.”

—
The Memphis Commercial Appeal

“Hooper’s wicked, sexy tale . . . proves she is a writer of great promise.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“An affecting thriller that mixes just the right gothic chills with erotically charged suspense.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

“Utterly beguiling . . . a Russian doll of a book.”

—
The Guardian

“Funny, edgy, and sparky as sherbet, Hooper’s novel lingers in the mind with all the sweetness and menace of childhood itself.”

—
The Independent

“Dazzling . . . It would be difficult to point to a less sentimental lament to childhood’s innocence lost than Hooper’s chillingly original performance—and equally difficult to find one as engaging or bluntly moving.”

—
The Irish Times

“It is difficult to believe that this clever, creepy tale is Chloe Hooper’s first novel . . . . Its originality and ambition make it a deeply impressive debut.”

—
The Sunday Telegraph

“This book will win prizes. It will be made into a film. But most importantly, it will enthrall audiences worldwide. A true classic.”

—
The Mirror

“Perhaps the greatest mystery about this dark, witty, deeply felt, suspenseful, and erotic tale is how someone as young as Chloe Hooper comes to know so much, to write so well, to show such command of prose, storytelling, and passion.”

—Judith Thurman, author of
Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette

“Chloe Hooper is a novelist of undoubted power and remarkable literary skill.”

—Fay Weldon, author of
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1: A whimpering echoed underground

Chapter 2: Scouring every hidey-hole!

Chapter 3: Kitty spied the stainless steel instruments

Chapter 4: “That old pussycat’s seen it all”

Chapter 5: Missing is such a polite word

Chapter 6: All the old concerns flooded back

Chapter 7: Improvising with great aplomb

Chapter 8: “And what should I laugh at?”

Chapter 9: The bushland gang were watching over him

Acknowledgments

A Scribner Reading Group Guide

Author's Note

The Engagement
Excerpt

About Chloe Hooper

For J & T

• MURDER AT BLACK SWAN POINT •

A whimpering echoed underground.

A
long the cliff the duo traveled, the wind in their fur. Kitty Koala held her breath as she snuggled against Terence Tiger’s soft coat. Each giant boulder vibrated with alarm. Each tiny pebble quivered underfoot. Kangaroos bounding to the crime scene covered the eyes of their curious joeys, while overhead a flock of galahs streaked the sky a wild pink. When there was trouble at Black Swan Point, the bushland creatures were the first to know.

A crowd of animals had gathered in the driveway of the Siddells’ ramshackle cottage. No sooner had Terence arrived than the
tiger pricked his sharp ears. From underground a whimpering echoed: “Boo-hoo-hoo!” Then, goodness! A little furry nose popped out of a burrow. “Why,” Kitty exclaimed, “it’s Wally Wombat!”

“Wally,” said Terence breathlessly. “Whatever has happened?”

“Oh dear!” sobbed the usually gruff wombat. “Poor Ellie Sid-dell . . .”

Terence raised an eyebrow.

“Well,” Wally murmured, slightly shamefaced, “I guess you’ve heard about her torrid personal life?”

Kitty blushed, wringing her paws. Ellie was a nurse at the local veterinary clinic, a fun-loving girl and strikingly pretty. But every local pet, recently vaccinated, had a story to tell about Ellie and the debonair vet. No matter that Graeme Harvey was married with three children—half the dogs in town returned from being fixed with some humiliating anecdote involving the couple’s lunch-hour exploits.

A tear rolled down Wally Wombat’s fur. “She was still a lovely girl, a lovely, gentle girl!”

Terence and Kitty glanced at each other. Rushing to the Siddells’ window, they peeked inside. “Turn away, Kitty!” implored the tiger. “Please don’t look!” Ellie’s room, with its blue rosebud wallpaper, bore evidence of a deadly struggle. The cosmetics covering her dressing table had been strewn sideways; an evening dress hung on the wardrobe door, horribly slashed. Why, even some small china ornaments on the windowsill—a turtle, a bunny, a kitten—were cracked, or shattered to dust.

Terence Tiger covered Kitty Koala’s eyes. He could hardly bear to look himself, yet somehow he managed. It was as if a wild—well, frankly—a wild animal had been at work here, the tiger thought. “Who could have done such a thing?” He stared across the horizon. At the bottom of the cliffs, black swans sang mournfully. The stately birds dipped their long necks in and out of the water, arching, straining: an ocean of question marks.

T
HE ROAD ALONG
which Thomas and I were traveling was cut clear into a cliff face. Rude shadows of electricity poles and gum trees flashed across the windscreen. I lifted my skirt. Peeling off my panty hose, I examined new luminous veins running along the insides of my thighs. Thomas liked the way that primary-school teachers dress. Each morning, he claimed, teachers imagine what the children would like them to wear. “I have seen grown women in party frocks with ribbons in their hair.” A posse of Alices who took a wrong turn. As my hand crept higher, Thomas’s driving deteriorated. I concentrated on the scenery: the boulders could be tiny or like the buttressed walls of a cathedral. Some were very curvaceous, almost bulbous. “I spy a granite elephant complete with a trunk.” I giggled. With my little eye, rocks also formed shapes like mouths, like tongues, like pornographic things.

Opposite these Rorschach cliffs, a huge sign, the shape of a fat court jester, appeared in the driver-side window. The jester, in medieval dress and dark sunglasses, trumpeted cheap deals on color TVs and jacuzzis two kilometers up the road. As it happened, Thomas was also wearing sunglasses and as he turned, smiling at me, a picture of the duo lined up. Thomas, so handsome in his finely cut suit, was the first person you’d
expect to be doing this. He was middle-aged, for a start, with his every feature perfectly symmetrical. He looked like a lawyer, and in fact he
was
a lawyer. And from his office he’d called the staff room during recess, confirming room service for lunch. “I’m going to rent a bed by the half hour,” he’d promised. “There’ll be peepholes in every wall, and a scoreboard outside the door.” He’d then left work early. Dumping his briefcase in the backseat, he’d driven out of Hobart—a city that still looked, from the top of Mt. Wellington, like a nineteenth-century oil painting. Sunlight soaked the clouds and purple hills soared in every direction. Hobart still looked like a triumphant oasis. And with his wife away publicizing her book, Thomas had left the city and sped toward the savages.

Laundry drying on a balcony railing now introduced the Sand and Waves Tudor Motel: a two-story slab of asbestos with exposed black beams. As a means of jazzing up the Tudor theme, each door had once been painted a different pastel color. Closing my eyes, I could almost smell the sheets. The pungency of fishermen’s orgies and mermaids gone bad. “We’ll rent a waterbed from some old seadog,” Thomas had said. “We’ll lock ourselves away, a musty Bible in the drawer in case it all goes horribly wrong.” A lawyer is as interested as any criminal in how to sideswipe a rule: this affair was to be kept away from the sentimental. We only met like this, Thomas kept reminding me, to alleviate boredom. I hooked my fingers around the elastic of my underpants, and turning from him, started to slowly wriggle free. A philosopher he admired proposed that facing the finality of death helped people make something of their lives.

“Leave on your heels,” Thomas suggested.

I took off one shoe and tried to slide the tiny underpants past my ankle. The trick was to act nonchalant, almost as if Thomas weren’t there. He slowed, sensing I had some problem. Under scrutiny, I finished the maneuver and folded my hands in my lap.

“Bravo.” Leaning over, laughing, Thomas kissed my neck. Another jester appeared, marking the driveway. Considering the motel’s signage, it would be too much to wear sunglasses checking in. He kissed my neck and we drove straight past.

“Are we there yet?”

“Kate, don’t pout.” He leaned harder on the accelerator. “I’ve been thinking about this all morning. I know exactly what I’m going to do to you.”

“I don’t mind
that much
if we just go back there.”

He paused. “We can do slightly better.”

I stared at the tiny piece of black cotton now lying by my feet. I’d waited for Thomas in a back lane, eavesdropping as the little girls on the other side of the fence conducted wedding ceremonies: “Do you promise to love him for the whole of your life? Okay, then you can throw away your flowers . . . Kiss! Now, it’s nine months later in the hospital. You play peekaboo.” The boys were elsewhere, pretending they could fart dangerous nuclear weapons. One of my students had just been reported for pulling down his pants, trying to “bomb” an old woman walking past the school gates. The day before I’d accompanied him to the principal’s office, and it made me awfully sad to see this scrawny kid, with barely anything which gave him pride, enter her room a bright-eyed hero, and leave again chastised and vengeful.

I opened my handbag, depositing my own stray underpants. “Was Veronica excited to be getting away?”

“Yes,” Thomas answered. “Thank you for inquiring.” Clearing his throat he added coolly, “Of course Lucien will miss her. Although I guess you’d know that as well as I would.”