Book review: The Last Trace by Petronella McGovern

I was taken on a walk down memory lane to my old life in international development in The Last Trace by Petronella McGovern, as our lead character is a water engineer who’s dedicated his life to providing safe drinking water in developing countries. But he’s back home in his parents old house with his visiting son when this opens and avoiding work calls and emails so seemingly on more than an extended break.

Family. It means everything to Sheridan. Her brother Lachy is finally home in Australia and she's excited about Easter with him and their nephew. But when a traumatic incident tears the families apart, she blames him.

Lachy knows he's not coping right now but his sister doesn't have the full story. And nor does he. There are some gaps in his memory. How is he connected to a DNA request, a missing woman, and a hit and run?

To untangle the truth, he must decide who he can trust. His friends? His family? Himself?

We’re hosted by Lachy, son Kai and Lachy’s sister Sheridan in the present, but there are also chapters narrated by someone called Elizabeth in 1968. The only ‘Betty’ in the present is a macabre old doll which Gloria (Lachy and Sheridan’s mother – who has dementia and is in a care facility) keeps requesting. So there’s an intriguing mystery tempting us from the past as well as drama in the present. We learn Kai was sent to live with his father after getting involved ‘with the wrong crowd’ in the city but he’s struggling to fit in at his new school. And then there’s Lachy who is suffering blackouts and who took a DNA test following a request from a one-night-stand and the results seem to have triggered events from his younger years as a camp counsellor in the US.

From the book’s opening Lachy seems incredibly depressed but there’s more to it as he’s obviously suffering post-traumatic stress disorder from his overseas work and being exposed to starvation, disease and death, but also seemingly frustrated and disappointed at the world in general and our response to climate change. There’s a pervading sense of doom in his thinking, though we learn some of that has been triggered by recent events.

At the beginning of last year, he’d felt his anxiety growing. There was no defining moment, just an accumulation of the effects of climate change on his work. Half a billion people faced constant water shortages. For another four billion, water was scarce for part of the year. Insane numbers of lives. Reports of more droughts and bushfires and floods and heatwaves across the globe had intensified his ecological distress. He’d done all the right things, talked to his colleagues, joined some online forums and read up on strategies to overcome climate anxiety. p 141

There’s a vivid sense of place here. Though we start this off in the Snowy Mountains (rural Australia), McGovern then takes us to the US and Pennsylvania.

This isn’t a novel of suspense, thriller or even crime fiction as such, it’s more a slow burn of a mystery and it’s one of several books I’ve read recently that have involved the use of DNA / genetic testing to solve old crimes. But there are deeper issues being examined here in addition to the links Lachy might have to unsolved mysteries. McGovern sympathetically but firmly takes on relationships and parenting, long-kept secrets and past shame.

The Last Trace by Petronella McGovern was published in Australia by Allen & Unwin and is now available.

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