Book review: What I Would Do To You by Georgia Harper

What I Would Do To You by Georgia Harper won the Sisters in Crime 2025 Davitt Award for best debut crime fiction this year. It’s certainly warranted but interesting as I’m unsure I’d classify this as crime fiction – more the aftermath of a crime perhaps? Either way Harper certainly offers up a confronting commentary on many MANY topical issues, from climate change to gender roles to domestic and family violence and sexual assault. It’s set in 2039, so the near distant future and in many ways it’s akin to a warning… of the direction society could find itself taking if we don’t heed the many warnings that seem to be ever-present.

The death penalty is back. But if the victim’s family wants the perpetrator to die, they have to do it themselves. Twenty-four hours alone in a room with the condemned. No cameras. No microphones. Just whatever punishment they decide befits the crime.

Ten-year-old Lucy was murdered four years earlier. Through counselling sessions with their court-appointed psychologist, we learn the stories of her family Lucy’s two mothers – Stella and Matisse – her much older brother and her bookish teenage sister, who is too young to participate in the execution, but who has plans of her own . . .

As the execution date nears, already-struggling Stella remains adamant that she must carry out the punishment. But it becomes clear that if she steps into that room, the family may lose her too.

The death penalty is back in something called survivor-led capital punishment… where family members take justice—well vengeance in reality—into their own hands in an ‘anything goes’ environment. We learn that the death penalty was returned after too many repeat offenders breached orders, only to reoffend, particularly in relation to AVOs and DVOs. And we’ve certainly seen some tragic events in recent times as well as some (potentially) knee-jerk reactions from governments based on populist ideologies.

This unfolds from the point of view of Octavia, a psychologist appointed to work with the family of a murdered girl (10 year old Lucy) to prepare them to decide whether to take the life of the perpetrator. She’s extremely likeable and Harper (also a psychologist) is able to put readers in her thoughts and the many ethical quandaries she must navigate here.

We have a second narrator in Hannah who has recently turned 18 but in her early teens when Lucy was killed and is consumed with guilt about her little sister’s death. We learn that Hannah’s keeping secrets and though Stella (who’s been in a haze for the four years since Lucy was killed) hasn’t noticed her behaviour, Matisse is worried about her remaining daughter.

In many ways What I Would Do To You is a study in grief and its impact on those left behind. Lucy’s mothers, Stella and Matisse are coping with the death of their daughter in very different ways. Stella is hell-bent on revenge though Matisse worries that the act of taking someone’s life will break her, something Stella eventually realises though at the same time believes she cannot let her daughter’s killer live. And Harper expresses this through her powerful prose.

Her face is a mixture of terror and determination. Suddenly I know – with certainty – that she will not survive this. Call it intuition, gut instinct. She will walk out of the prison alive, of course, but she will not survive whatever it is she does in that room. My mind’s eye shows me flashes of consequences I wish never to see come to fruition. Losses this family cannot bear. p 310

Stella and Matisse run an ‘ethical’ cattle farm so this is set in rural Queensland and Harper uses the setting as a plot device, with a bushfire threatening the farm and those bunkering down there. I initially felt it was a bit of a distraction from the main plot and decision respective family members were needing to make, but later realised it was a galvanising factor and a reminder of bigger, less human threats.

This isn’t a ‘light’ read. It’s one full of moral and ethical dilemmas. I love that Harper’s taken a very measured approach to the decision(s) facing the characters and suggest this would be a great book-club read with many factors up for debate.