Crows Nest by Nikki Mottram

Publisher's Synopsis

Fleeing problems in her own marriage, child protection worker Dana Gibson leaves Sydney for a job in the Queensland town of Toowoomba. Her first house call is to nearby Crows Nest to assess the children of Sandra Kirby, which results in her getting both her new boss and a local detective offside. Dana soon learns that, in the country, city rules do not apply.

When Sandra and her best friend are found shot dead, Dana is drawn into an investigation that will force her to strip away the friendly veneer of small-town life, while grappling with ghosts of her own. As buried secrets, bitter tensions and corruption come to light, how far will locals go to stop her uncovering the truth of what happened?

My Review of Crows Nest by Nikki Mottram

Crows Nest is the debut thriller by Australian author Nikki Mottram and shines a spotlight on the difficult area of child protection and family services. This is a murder mystery set in the rural town of Toowoomba in Queensland during the mid-1990s. It’s a briskly evolving story that depends largely on the dogged determination of the lead character, Dana Gibson.

Dana has moved from Sydney to Toowoomba after a marriage break-up and to recover from the loss of her baby son. She is a community services worker who is making the adjustment of working in a small town environment and is yet to win over her new colleagues. The case she is assigned, the one chosen for her to break her into the local area, is the Kirby family or, more specifically, Sandra Kirby and whether she is properly caring for her children.

Barely 24 hours after meeting Sandy and the rest of her family for the first time, the news hits that there’s been a double homicide and the two people found dead are Sandy and her best friend. They’d been shot to death in their car out on a remote bush track. It’s a traumatic scene and comes as a terrible shock to Dana, although her reaction is where things start to get a bit sketchy for me.

My expectations would have been that Dana’s involvement from here on out were to ensure the children of the murdered woman were properly cared for, safe and well. With a full list of other outstanding cases, her time and attention should then have been best spent ensuring her other families were similarly cared for and attended to.

Instead, Dana went rogue, turning herself into a quasi-detective, running an investigation with little or no authority and almost as much expertise. The results are kind of expected and while she managed to ruffle feathers and come up with a plausible scenario for what had actually happened, it came at the expense of putting herself and her friends and acquaintances in grave danger. 

I found it very difficult to sympathise with her or find much empathy with the majority of characters in the book. The aspect of the story that was most difficult to accept or believe was the inclusion by Dana of her 11 year old neighbour in what is essentially a murder investigation. Surely no-one in their right mind, particularly an experienced family welfare officer, would allow such a thing to happen. 

The negative comments aside, the premise behind the murders and the process of investigating, gathering and dealing with the clues and the mad scramble to bring the killer to justice ensured that the pace was solid from start to finish. There were quite a few questions left to be answered and, given that this is the first in a proposed series, I’m prepared to return to find out whether Dana has learnt from her mistakes.