On the face of it, THE PRECIPICE is not a crime fiction novel, although by the end you realise that more than one crime has been committed, and there are certainly plenty of puzzles to solve.

Thea Farmer became a teacher and eventually a school principal without much liking children. She thinks she is a pretty good judge of character, but doesn't really get on with people particularly well, preferring her own company and that of her elderly dog Teddy. She was dealt a cruel blow in her forced retirement by the global financial crisis and has to sell her dream home in the Blue Mountains. She resents the people who've bought her house but as she has bought the cottage next door, which she calls the "hovel", she is very aware of them.

Thea joins a creative writing class and through her pieces for the class, and her interactions with the people who have bought her house, we piece together the mystery of her life. In fact there is more than one mystery. Despite her better judgement Thea befriends 12 year Kim.

When she begins to believe that her new neighbour Frank is not a good role model or guardian for his niece Kim, Thea is unable to stand to one side and do nothing.

An intriguing book that kept my interest throughout. Towards the end the tension builds as you just know Thea is going to do something and are not sure what. And is it something she has done before? ( )

I suppose finding some sort of "pattern" in what you're reading, when you read a lot of books, is inevitable, but it always intrigues when I find that sort of co-incidence showing up. At the moment it's well-written unsympathetic, often off-putting characterisations. THE PRECIPICE has more than one of those in spades.

Thea Farmer's voice is very realistic, the retired school principal, reclusive, difficult, with a small circle of carefully chosen people she interacts with; her only soft edges come from her relationship with her beloved, and rapidly aging, dog. Resentful and hostile, she's prickly, acerbic, standoffish and seemingly unable to find anyway to reconcile herself to the loss of her dream home and the invasion of her privacy that this new couple, and the child with them, inflict on her controlled and private world.

This is most definitely not a book for readers who like events declared right up front, and investigations and resolutions with everything neat, tidy and answered at the end. It's not even a book that declares a "crime" or a problem blatantly, although I suppose it might be possible to take an educated guess at where we could be heading, if you have the time, or the inclination to want to try to double guess the author. But it's really not that sort of a book. THE PRECIPICE is very much a psychological thriller, moving seamlessly from the resentful mutterings of a grumpy old woman, through the development of a cessation of hostilities rather than friendship with the young girl, to a minefield of responsibility and dilemma. There's the odd stutter and stumble along the way - they could be plot vagaries, they could equally be the vagaries of a tricky narrator.

The book is undoubtedly one of those slow burn, sleeper type thrillers. The plot's very slow to reveal, which makes the reader really have to concentrate on Thea's life - her main obsessions as well. She's definitely terse, she's judgemental and more than a bit snobby at points, all of which seem perfectly in character, it's probably a tendency towards whinging that really stood out as a character flaw - somehow that just didn't fit with the rest of the woman's persona. Having said that, there was something "not quite right" about the new neighbours as well... overly "nice", too contrasted to Thea to be true.

So far, it sounds like there's not a lot going for THE PRECIPICE, and I can't begin to tell you how surprised I was to find that it had gone from a book to be slogged through, to something unable to be put down. But it did, and that was quite a while before the "point" of the drama was clearly revealed, before the crime was declared, and some reason for everyone being assembled on the pages was constructed. Where that happened, when the why or the what or the how became less important and the doing, the build up, the slow reveal really started to work, is still a bit of a mystery to this reader. But work it did. ( )