See How They Fall
by Rachel Paris

Rich people murdering each other and hiding terrible secrets is a genre that will never die, and for good reason. It’s ridiculously entertaining. In Rachel Paris’s debut novel, See How They Fall, we’ve got obscene wealth, murderous intentions, incompetent police, and stakes that could not be higher: if this was a Netflix drama, it would be binge-worthy.

The novel, set in Australia, opens at a country estate called Yallambee, where the first of our two narrators, Skye Turner, is arriving with her husband and child for the ‘first gathering of the Turner family since Campbell’s funeral. No security, no chefs, no nannies, just family’. Campbell is ‘the poor Turner kid from Gawler [who] had made it big’ – CEO and founder of Turner Corp, the mysterious ‘global luxury empire’ central to the novel. His death has left a few too many open questions about family succession. (There are similarities here with the TV series Succession, as well as suggestions of a certain Australian global-media family.)

‘We usually only visited Yallambee in midsummer,’ Skye tells us, ‘when the light was golden and guests arrived by superyacht and helicopter to join Campbell’s glittering beach parties’, but this time, it’s Easter – the weather is turning, and the estate looks less perfect than usual ‘under a charred autumn sky’. Combined with the recent death in the family, this setting adds a sense of ominous foreboding: Paris has set the scene perfectly for a good old-fashioned whodunnit with all the trimmings. Skye’s comment that ‘ten years ago, when Duncan and I first visited his family’s private bay, I’d thought I was entering paradise’ suggests that whatever is about to happen will be the opposite.

Duncan Turner, Skye’s husband, is the middle son, at odds with both his older brother Jamie, who has ‘always been an entitled prick’ and younger brother Hugo, a wastrel in gold aviators, ‘reeking of cologne and already twitchy from coke’, and only tolerated in the family business ‘to stop him wreaking havoc elsewhere’. Jamie’s wife is prim, sophisticated Nina who, Skye observes, is ‘dressed like the love child of a nun and a Stepford wife’. Hugo’s date, Tamara, is a Turner Corp employee with ‘the homogenous beauty of an Instagram influencer’.

Skye and Duncan have a little girl, Tilly; Nina and Jamie have three children. But there’s another family member at Yallambee that night: a young man named Cody, with ‘shaved head and tattooed forearms’ who arrives by Ford Falcon rather than helicopter. This is Duncan’s son from a long-ago relationship, meeting his suspicious uncles for the first time. (‘I can only assume you’re trying to claim some inheritance?’ says Hugo.) Their father ‘would have been appalled by Cody,’ Skye thinks – ‘both the fact of his illegitimate existence and his unrefined appearance, neither of which aligned with the Turners’ carefully curated image’. Skye is more accepting, because she ‘didn’t exactly fit the mould either’. Skye is an artist rather than a socialite and grew up in a town ‘littered with broken bungalows and rusted-out cars, and where the scorching heat and cheap grog left everyone wilted and listless’.

During this fateful weekend, someone will leave after a furious row, someone will be rushed to hospital and someone will die; almost everyone will be under suspicion. The novel’s other narrator, Mei O’Connor, is a half-Chinese, half-Irish police detective in Sydney working the Yallambee case. When Skye meets Mei, she notices ‘liquid black hair in a slick ponytail, tailored monochrome outfit and a feline quality that was both sleek and hostile’. Mei is more blunt in her perceptions of ‘bohemian goddess’ Skye, ‘an artist who made weird ceramic vases’ and ‘glowed like the sun shone out of her arse’.

Both women are under pressure. Skye is in shock, her home encircled by media and ominous new security guards. Past experiences have made it hard for Skye to trust herself, and we also begin to question whether we can trust her as a narrator, since she admits that her whole perception is ‘shifting and cracking’. Paris is accomplished in moving us from the imagery of an Agatha Christie-inspired mystery to twisting psychological thriller without a single misstep or clanging tone:

The doctor arrived with a black medical bag and a grave expression. He prescribed sleeping pills and asked how I was feeling. What did he expect me to say? There were no words for this. We sat in the library. Between us, on the coffee table, stood the Lego castle that Tilly and I had built last Thursday night. I traced my finger over the candy-pink bricks that we’d assembled together – the block-headed princess still waving from the top tower where Tilly had placed her – and I was seized by the certainty that none of this was real. It was all elaborate make-believe. A macabre prank.

Mei – dealing with a terminally ill mother and a ‘sexist dinosaur’ of a boss – is determined to uncover the truth. Wilson, the shitty boss, feels almost like a caricature of a policeman (‘Where the hell have you two been? … I’ve got the commissioner on me, as well as the leeching bloody media’.) Her family dynamic is more nuanced. Mei lost her sister as a child, and her father to suicide not long after, and now with a sick mother, is facing a lonely future.

Soon I would be the only one left of the four of us. As if that fact had only just occurred to me, all the possible paths that I’d ever imagined might lie ahead of me suddenly curled back on themselves like withered vines, until all I could envisage was myself, alone at the end of a blank cul-de-sac.

Skye and Mei need to work together and use all the means at their disposal to take down the Turners and solve this case. The two very different depictions of women dealing with trauma help cement them as flawed, realistic characters. Paris adheres to the tropes of the genre enough for us to feel impatient for an ending that will satisfy, but the central mystery is just convoluted enough to keep readers interested all the way through. Each scrap of evidence both deepens our curiosity and slides us closer to the final revelations. And despite the possible limitations of the genre, Paris is still able to show off her writing chops: descriptions like the ‘bone-crunch of tyres on the driveway’, a ‘methuselah of Cristal’ and ‘the bardo between wakefulness and sleep’ all serve to remind us that this novel is no run-of-the-mill detective procedural.

Paris draws on her long career working in law to lend credibility and realism to the story and the characters. She demonstrates a mastery of language, plot and character development without ever letting herself get bogged down in the rigid structure of a typical police procedural: we’re never waiting for the next piece of evidence to push the plot forward; we are piecing together what has already been laid out for the characters and the reader. See How They Fall is both intelligent and readable, revealing just enough to both us and the characters themselves to keep the mystery compelling and alive.