- Reckless, by Marele Day. Ultimo Press, $39.99.
Marele Day won a Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award for crime writing with her four-book Claudia Valentine series, and this, together with other novels, such as the best-selling Lambs of God and Mrs Cook: The Real and Imagined life of the Captain's Wife, has established her status as an experienced and well-seasoned Australian author.
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She has a finely tuned touch for narrative pace, a useful skill in any genre, but crucial in the suspense-driven shadows of sleuthing and crime.
Reckless is a daringly curious amalgam of true crime and memoir, since the central character, Frenchman Jean Kay, who was born in Algiers in 1943 and died in France in 2012, and variously described as a hijacker, thief, mercenary and international adventurer, was Day's friend and travelling companion.
Born with a problem "wandering eye", Day underwent a sequence of corrective surgeries as a child, which never quite aligned her sight, and being a rebel, she soon decided to "follow the wandering eye that always looked elsewhere and see where it took me".
In 1978, following the car accident loss of Tony, her soulmate love, Day was shaken by the way grief seemed to have misaligned her life more severely than her eyes, and decided it was time to leave.
She travelled north, eventually joining the crew of a Catamaran in Darwin, heading vaguely for Sri Lanka, and captained by a man with whom she felt immediately a shared "elemental empathy". Perhaps because, as she tells us, "Jean Kay had climbed the craggy cliffs of elsewhere, stood on the edge and seen beyond the horizon".
Day was unaware that Kay was also a fugitive, fleeing an embezzlement scandal involving millions of dollars.
Of course, I Googled Jean Kay, and was surprised to find that I had never heard of him. He saw himself as a friend and saviour of the poor and oppressed, and although there is ample evidence to support this claim, he was also a member of the OAS in Algeria, a terrorist organisation in defence of French rule which left a legacy of horror and was associated in other places with right wing extremists.
Day didn't know any of this on the catamaran and kept in touch with the charismatic Frenchman.
Thirty years later, and now a well-known and accomplished writer, Day - unable to resist the temptations of "elsewhere" - agrees to research a complex life and reveal the dangerous path it took.
This book is the result. On a narrative scale it's a laudable success, but the lingering moral dilemma as to whether ends justify means remains hauntingly alive.
