 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Malicious Intent
By Kathryn Fox
Macmillan $30.00
Kathryn Fox might not be quite ready to give up her day job - as a GP and medical writer for popular journals - but she must be considering it, for in Dr Anya Crichton she has created an interesting, credible character and set her loose in an intriguing plot.
The action revolves around the successive discovery of dead women who have apparently suicided in a variety of unpleasant ways and who are found at post mortem to have severe genital herpes, traces of semen and an absence of pubic hair.
The first victim we meet is Clare Matthews, travelling home after night shift when she sees a respectable-looking man in a car park, speaking into his mobile and requesting road service for his supposedly vandalised BMW.
Finding her own car has been broken into, she offers to drive the stranger to the local police station.
'Out of the car park she waited at a stop sign for an opportunity to break into the dispersing traffic. Eventually, the man spoke. "Well, Clare. I was beginning to worry about you. You're not usually this late off the train."
Dr Crichton's first appearance is in a courtroom where she tells the jury what her job entails: 'As a forensic pathologist, I have conducted thousands of post-mortems to establish cause of death. As a forensic physician, I assess wounds and injuries of people who have been assaulted or involved in an assault and survived.'
In the former category are the women who begin turning up dead, all with the aforementioned characteristics and all, as Dr Crichton will discover, with mysterious fibres, similar to those causing asbestosis, in their lungs.
The victims include a 35-year old nun, pregnant as it happens, found at the bottom of a cliff in Sydney, and the daughter of a Lebanese standover merchant whose body, bruised to suggest long-term abuse, perhaps by her father, is discovered in a public toilet with heroin injecting gear.
While musing over the possibility of cult involvement, Anya presses ahead with investigating the strange fibres, emailing images around the world in the hope of getting an expert's ID. Then a woman who has unsuccessfully attempted suicide is brought to hospital and the jigsaw takes shape.
In an eerily gripping showdown, Anya Crichton tracks down and fronts the killer, getting the upper hand and signalling that we have not heard the last of the good doctor - in fact, either of them.
- Books reviewed are available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore.
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