It Takes A Town by Aoife Clifford

Publisher's Synopsis

So many people had reason to hate her, but did anyone have reason to kill her?

Everyone dies famous in a country town, but glamorous Vanessa Walton was a shining star. A celebrity since a television commercial when she was a child, Vanessa is back on the front page for all the wrong reasons; after a terrible storm she has been found dead at the bottom of her stairs.

At first her death seems to be a simple accident, but anonymous letters are discovered that suggest otherwise – and when 16-year-old Jasmine Landridge claims it is murder, she suddenly disappears. As the police begin to investigate, secrets are exposed and friendships unravel.

What happens to a community when murders and abductions sit alongside petty workmates, teenage tribulations and longstanding friendships? It will take a town to solve this crime, but what will be broken in the effort to piece together the truth?

My Review of It Takes A Town by Aoife Clifford

Small towns are hotbeds of gossip and opinion and when tragedy takes place, particularly when notable town members are involved, everyone has something to say about it. And it’s against this backdrop that the small town thriller It Takes A Town is set, complete with hidden scandals, personal vendettas that could very well be hiding any number of sordid motives for murder.

Vanessa Walton, the most famous person to come out of the town of Welcome is found dead in her home. It looks very much like an accident, a tumble down the stairs in her home, and the coroner indeed rules it an accidental death. 

It’s tragic, her best friend Frankie is distraught but accepts that accidents happen. But when she goes to her friend’s house to help clear it out, there are a few disturbing finds that suggest perhaps Vanessa’s death wasn’t quite as accidental as first thought.

Sergeant Carol Duffy is new to the town and is prepared to take the scene at face value. However, with an outsider’s view, she is also troubled by a few anomalies that are unearthed as she sifts through the case. Learning more about the various townsfolk and their association with the dead woman throws up a bunch of questions that need satisfactory answers.

And then Jaz Langridge, stepdaughter of one of the wealthiest men in Welcome, suddenly goes missing one day after school. The town is thrown into even greater turmoil, school kids grow uneasy at the thought that one of their own has been snatched off the street and the small police force is now stretched precariously thin.

Small town crime investigations always seem to have a special feel to them. Everyone knows everybody else, relationships are complicated by familiarity, lifelong friends are involved and it’s possible that deep-seated resentments could have caused any one of the locals to have snapped. In other words, we’re dealing with a whole town full of possible suspects and numerous potential witnesses who may not necessarily provide reliable accounts of what they’ve seen.

And speaking of the “whole town”, early on in the story it felt as though we were in the process of meeting every person in the town of Welcome. It was a little overwhelming trying to keep up with who was who and how they fit in with the rest of the town…and how they related to the story. Fortunately, things settled down, the more central characters quickly became familiar and the small town drama unfolded quite rapidly.

Frankie, as the central figure in the story, proves to be a level-headed woman, well suited to her job as a secondary school teacher. She manages to use her lifelong knowledge of the town and the people living there to her advantage as she tries to get to the bottom of Vanessa’s death. She tends to form a dynamic duo-type relationship with her lifelong friend Mer, both proving bold enough to confront just about anyone in town.

Aoife Clifford manages to combine a smattering of political intrigue with the petty bickering of local differences in such a way that it all merges together seamlessly. As well as getting to the bottom of a suspicious death and a missing person case, the story provides insight into the day to day life of a typical Australian small town. The machinations can be somewhat tricky no matter the size of the place. Apparently, according to Ms Clifford, Welcome is based on the NSW town of Bathurst - and, having spent quite a lot of time there, I can see that.