Book review: The Bluff by Joanna Jenkins

The Bluff by Joanna Jenkins is the first book I’ve read by the Aussie author as I missed her 2023 book, How to Kill a Client. It looks like it’s similarly themed… featuring lawyers and some rather unlikeable (and misogynistic) characters. And I really enjoyed this, racing through it – forced to keep guessing until the very end. Jenkins throws a lot of threads in here, but does it brilliantly so it’s not overly complicated, but sufficiently complex to keep readers* on their toes. (*Cannot think of book-themed metaphor!)

Ruth Dawson has taken a break from big city law to fill in for a few months at a mate's small-town legal practice in Myddle. It's not what she's used to . . .

So when she hears the front door of her office open she's expecting a weird demand, or a question she doesn't know the answer to. But it's Bea Baulderstone's mum, worried that she hasn't seen her seventeen-year-old daughter for five days, and Constable Gazza Parker is refusing to report the girl missing.

Ruth tries to find Bea, but Myddle is a wall of indifference. Then Dash Rogers is found at his farm gate, dead from a gunshot wound, and suddenly the town is very interested in Bea's whereabouts.

I very much liked Ruth – our main character and one of our narrators. And she’s meant to be likeable – self-effacing and pragmatic. We also get a glimpse into her character—her thinking, her sense of right and wrong AND her sense of humour—through her What’s App messages to her adult son who lives in the UK. Jack plays no role here, but helps humanise Ruth and their close relationship reflects well on her.

Jenkins takes readers back and forth in time, though it’s mostly the past and linear until Bea disappears and Dash is murdered. Then we jump about a little learning what transpired in the days prior to his death.

Other narrators are Dash’s wife Evie – a cattle farmer who inherited her family’s farm after her brother died years earlier. Gazza the local cop who’s a heavy-drinking not-very-law-abiding type. And there’s then Bea – who we meet in opening scenes and hear from again later… prior to her disappearance.

Jenkins give us some other great characters who add a lot of texture to the unfolding plot and events in the past and present, including Dash the murder victim who’s keen to turn his wife’s family farm into a tourism venture; Bea’s mum Victoria who is highly unpredictable; Ruth’s mentor (which took her to Myddle in the first place) Roscoe; and the yoga teacher he left his wife for. We also meet Troy, an Indigenous teenager who helps out on Evie’s farm and is friendly with Bea.

In Myddle we see the best and worst of country / small town living. And then there are the family dynamics – Roscoe and his adult daughter who dislikes his new girlfriend. Evie, desperate to get pregnant but unhappily married to the adulterous Dash who stands to get half her family farm if they divorced. And Troy and his mother Rita are forced to deal with overt racism every day.

I very much enjoyed this. Jenkins’s characters are strong and complex and I became invested in their lives. As for Bea’s disappearance and Dash’s murder… here there’s a real sense of greed, idiocy and bad BAD decisions rather than evil at play.

The Bluff by Joanna Jenkins was published in Australia by Allen & Unwin.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes.