The Accident

Katie McMahon

HOBART – the tiny capital city of Tasmania snuggled into the lee of the towering kunanyi/Mount Wellington – is loved by the inhabitants for its short work commutes, stunning views, and clean, bracing sea air.

But with a population of just 55,077, it’s also a place where everybody knows everybody and that means lives are intertwined and secrets are hard to keep... not least a secret that could cost someone their life.

Katie McMahon (pictured below), an exciting Australian writer whose debut novel, The Mistake, turned heads in the literary world, returns to chill and thrill us with a dark, character-driven mystery set on her home turf of Hobart where she works as a GP and teaches communication skills to medical students. Centred on three troubled women – whose close-knit suburban worlds are linked by unseen connections to friends, family and lovers – The Accident is a tense, page-turning, psychological drama which takes readers on a rollercoaster ride to a split-second event that will change them all forever.

Lonely Imogen has always wanted to be a doctor but working in the emergency department at a Hobart hospital has convinced her it’s a lie to believe that ‘stress and pressure brought out the best in people’ and that ‘facing hardship together forged bonds.’

Socially awkward and frequently careless, Imogen is struggling to prove her worth as a ‘lowly junior doctor. ’ She finds it difficult to be a ‘team player’ and has already come to the conclusion that the staff station is ‘not a very nice place.’

In another corner of the city, middle-aged single mum and veterinary surgeon Grace used to joke that her difficult daughter Emma was just going through the normal ‘teenage stage’ but there is nothing remotely funny about Emma’s behaviour now.

What started with an aversion to eating breakfast became full-blown anorexia and although Emma is now termed as being in recovery, she is still fragile and suffering some serious bullying and abuse at school which has been brought to her attention by Emma’s psychologist. And then there’s friendly, dedicated Hobart schoolteacher Zoe who has devoted the

last ten years of her life to her engineer boyfriend Daniel. It’s a relationship which has involved them sharing everything, from their friends to a shared home. But despite their lives being in so many ways ‘the same life,’ Daniel has taken a job far, far away in Vancouver, Canada, and he doesn’t want to take Zoe with him because he has met a younger woman at work.

Soon the pressure of Imogen’s job starts to slowly crack her fragile mental state and Grace is forced by circumstances to send Emma to another school, a move which threatens to expose a long-hidden secret.  Only Zoe’s life appears to have taken a turn for the better after falling blissfully in love with her new boyfriend Nick... in fact, things would be perfect for her if only an old friend of his wasn’t so obsessed with him. All it takes is one fateful accident – if it really was an accident – to spell disaster for them all.

Using her own lived-in experiences and insight, McMahon is proving to be a skilful observer of human flaws and frailties as she plunges us into the complex lives of three women whose fates are inevitably drawn together by the invisible threads of friendship, family and work. On the twisting and turning trail towards solving the events of the mystery accident – a journey that takes in events in both the past and the present – readers discover the light and darkness, fears and emotions that simmer dangerously beneath the surface of Grace, Zoe and Imogen.

Also explored under McMahon’s watchful eye are the ways in which early years shape the adult of the future, the lasting influences of a first love, the pernicious fall-out from eating disorders, and the negative impact of social rejection juxtaposed with the redemptive power of friendship.

With a narrative that winds seamlessly between the parallel lives of the three women – all the while exposing their ‘small world’ interconnections, and gathering intriguing clues to their shadowy secrets, game play and obsessions – the story hurtles towards  its dramatic conclusion. Gripping, intriguing, and full of contemporary issues we can all recognise, The Accident is a masterful second outing for an exciting new antipodean voice in fiction writing. 
(Zaffre, paperback, £9.99)