Book review: What the Bones Know by Kirstyn McDermott

I must admit to almost putting What the Bones Know by Kirstyn McDermott aside. There’s a haunting / mystical element to it and I hate books that dip into the supernatural as logic tends to go out the window which was slightly the case here. However there was enough of the ‘tangible’ elements of mystery/suspense to keep me contented, allowing me to skim the more fantastic elements. It was also interesting to be jolted back to the days of COVID-19 with its masks and lockdowns which – though incredibly disruptive at the time – feel like a lifetime ago, and another world entirely.

About this book

In the village of Kiln Creek in the Victorian Highlands, a ghost gum falls in a storm. Tangled in its roots are the bones of a small child and the tattered remains of her clothing, including a pair of bright red sneakers.

Single mum Jude Mees is in her early forties and struggling to get her business off the ground while raising her ten-year-old daughter Katie, and managing a fractious relationship with her controlling ex-husband. But when Jude learns that her mother, Nance, who still lives alone on the family property in Kiln Creek, is showing troubling signs of dementia she has no option other than to return and check on her. And indeed, all is not well at the farm. Nance is slowly drifting off into her own world, and there are other disturbing occurrences. Strange smells, inexplicably wet footprints, a voice in the night. As her daughter starts to sleepwalk and Jude's nightmares begin to take over her days, she begins to wonder whether her imagination is out of control or if something more sinister is happening...

My thoughts

This opens with a prologue and the discovery of old bones but we’re kept in the dark for much of the book, eventually learning whose bones and suspected cause of death. McDermott paces the reveal well, as events also unfold in the present and past perfectly timed, for us to piece together the puzzle.

McDermott gives us some complex and multi-tiered characters here in Jude and her mother. I had a real sense of who Jude was and the balance she’s trying to maintain in her life. It’s most apt she’s establishing a cleaning business as she arrives at her mother’s to find Nance has become a hoarder. Still keeping her dead husband’s stuff and accumulating things being thrown away by others. We don’t get a lot of insight into Nance in the present, other than the fact she dips in and out of her dementia. My own mother’s been diagnosed with Alzheimers so I understand the those suffering from it can be completely lucid one moment and confused in the next. We do get the impression though Nance’s relationship with Jude as a child was fractious so perhaps it’s not only the dementia that’s causing her to be a prickly old thing.

Jude is joined in her narration by a blonde girl, an eight year old who is accustomed to running around her family property – climbing trees and swimming in the river – and who comes across an English girl holidaying nearby with her family. The English girl jokes about running away (albeit temporarily) and the blonde challenges her new friend, who she likens to a princess, to join her in her usual exploits…. which she does, before things go tragically wrong.

Hovering in the background is the sense of ‘something’. Nance believes she sees a woman standing in the dark, looking at her house. And Jude, feels a presence. She describes it at one point and the logic-lover in me struggled to understand what this amorphous ‘thing’ is… though eventually (I think) we get some clarity. I was also unsure if Jude’s references to water flooding her room were hallucinations because they seemed to be actually happening. Again, as I’m not a fan of supernatural fiction I skimmed those and read this as a straight mystery. A whodunnit. Or a whodunwhat? And in that sense I enjoyed unpicking the bittersweet mystery lurking in the dark until recently unearthed. Literally.

What the Bones Know by Kirstyn McDermott was published by HQ Fiction and now available.

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