'Freycinet' is a novel by Melanie Calvert. It is set on the east coast of Tasmania, and was inspired by two separate unsolved rural Tasmanian crimes, being the disappearance in 1993 of Nancy Grunwaldt and the murder in 1995 of Victoria Cafasso.
This novel is available only as an ebook, published by the author.
Readers of the weekend 'Australian Magazine' will be familiar with the back section of the magazine which is filled with coloured images of Tasmania in all its astonishing and beautiful moods. The Freycinet National Park is frequently featured, and is one of the island’s most pristine and treasured beauty spots. ‘Wineglass Bay’ has echoes of Nabokov, and the naming of the mountain peaks ‘The Hazards’ carries its own warning.
The novel, a thriller, is rich in lyrical yet ominous descriptions of the landscape. This is not exactly the place Tourism Tasmania is promoting in the 'Australian Magazine'. The epigraph is taken from Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘A Dream Within a Dream’, and references this to the character of Miranda in Joan Lindsay’s novel 'Picnic at Hanging Rock'. Where Lindsay’s novel offers (at least in its first publication) no answer to the mystery of the disappearance of its girls, 'Freycinet’s' final pages give the solution which is a grisly twist. The narrative develops in an atmosphere of weird danger, very weird indeed. The story of love, obsession, hatred, jealousy and hideous crime develops through the insights of dreams and visions, while following the procedure of a police investigation. Indigenous myths as well as European fairy tales play a role in the construction of this psychological thriller.
You can buy the ebook 'Freycinet' on Amazon for $US 4.99.
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