[CLOSED] Win the NEXT book of the month December: Goodwood

On her website, Throsby – also an accomplished singer and songwriter – says she likes “good books, cryptic crosswords, small towns and dogs” and it appears she has managed to fold all four into Goodwood. Rather than a heart-pounding thriller, she has created a whimsical page-turner that relies as much on the reader’s engagement with her cast of idiosyncratic characters and smile-inducing observations as it does on the mysteries that have befuddled and devastated the townsfolk. Clues to the two disappearances are sprinkled all through the novel, but trying to pick what are clues and what are simply fanciful detail is half the fun. We have the unlikeable Derek Murray, who is “as dumb as a box of hair” and the menacing Carl White, who uses his belt buckle as a weapon – causing one Goodwood citizen to announce, “May the cat eat him and may the devil eat the cat”. Then there’s unfathomable farmer Kevin Fairley, who finds it hard to not moo back at his cows, and Rosie’s boyfriend Davo who lives, literally, on the wrong side of the tracks. Meanwhile 17-year-old narrator Jean Brown finds there is as much intrigue about Evie, the new girl in school, as there is in Rosie and Bart’s vanishings, which have caused the kind of grief that poetically hangs in the shop awnings and in “the silence between sentences”. A complex, charming and utterly satisfying read.