Patricia McLean
See How They Fall by Rachel Paris (Moa Press, 2025), 325pp, $38
Rachel Paris’s debut novel, See How They Fall, is a cleverly constructed crime novel built around two narratives. The first is Skye Turner’s: yummy-mummy ceramicist and daughter-in-law of recently deceased Australian oligarch Campbell Turner. The other is Mei O’Connor’s: a no-nonsense Irish Chinese police detective caring for her terminally ill mother in a grotty flat. While Skye appears to have achieved a perfect life, Mei’s is unravelling at every turn. As the mysteries at the centre of this compelling thriller unfold, the similarities between the two women become increasingly apparent, contributing to the novel’s feminist undertones and final denouement.
The book opens with Skye’s description of an Easter break at the Turners’ country estate, Yallambee, north of Sydney. The servants have been dismissed so the family can gather in private to discuss their deceased patriarch’s will and the ramifications for his three sons, including Skye’s husband, Duncan. In other words, the perfect setting for a family homicide. Used only in midsummer for pleasure, Skye’s description of the luxury house takes on an ominous air on this chilly autumn morning: ‘Fog was still rising when we rolled through [its] ornate iron gates’ and ‘… the estate looked strange under a charred autumn sky’.
Some reviewers have compared the novel to the TV series Succession and The White Lotus, as another story of rich people behaving badly. The three Turner siblings clearly hate each other and, like the Roys, their family motto could well be that money can buy you helipads but not happiness. Yet Paris creates characters that are more nuanced, as though she is deliberately playing with Succession-type tropes while leading us somewhere else entirely. There are familiar figures thrown in, too: Nina, the uptight trophy wife of the eldest brother; an obnoxious younger brother with a drug problem; and Duncan’s secret son from an earlier relationship. At this early stage of the plot, fans of crime fiction will recognise the motifs: an isolated country manor housing a cast of potential villains. But when the second third-person narrative begins, the tone shifts to Aussie noir, offsetting the somewhat joyless splendour of the first narrative.
Mei O’Connor is the recently promoted police detective assigned to investigate a suspicious poisoning during the Turners’ Easter getaway. At first the case is a welcome distraction from her personal troubles. Despite these pressures, her droll delivery is funny and engaging. She describes the outlook from her office cubicle as ‘… an artificial potted fiddle-leaf fig, still strangled with Christmas tinsel’. She signals her social conscience early when she first visits Skye’s palatial home: ‘These people could snuff out poverty in the inner city by liquidating a single painting’, and on the drive there she observes ‘Skinny blondes in activewear—the type that survived on bone broth and organic air’. In See How They Fall, Sydney is a city of two halves.
Mei’s observations are peppered with witty references. One character is ‘a blandly beautiful woman, with a touch of the Kardashian’. Another’s complexion is ‘Trumpian orange’, while someone else is described as a ‘bunny boiler’. And a reference to Ottolenghi’s Chicken Marbella places the Turner family bang on trend, gastronomically speaking at least.
Initially Skye and Mei are constructed as false opposites. Skye is a blonde beauty living in gilded-cage luxury, while Mei’s life is anything but glamorous. Their descriptions of each other clash with the reader’s first impressions. For Mei, the vulnerable Skye is a ‘goddess’, while for Skye, Mei has ‘a feline quality that was both sleek and hostile’—nothing like the bedraggled daughter and betrayed fiancée we already know her to be. But as the story unfolds, similarities between the two women are gradually revealed. Haunted by their pasts, both have suffered terrible loss. Skye’s anguish is palpable: ‘The sick glutinous feeling inside me was starting to set’, while Mei buries her emotions in work.
Through their points of view, the reader is treated to convincing characterisations: Skye as a study in self-reinvention, Mei as the conscientious, misunderstood outsider. In the fine tradition of the murder mystery, their insights offer a smorgasbord of red herrings that keep us guessing. Weaving through the narratives are the suspicious actions of Skye’s husband, who may or may not be gaslighting her; a ‘bastard’ son who may or may not have an axe to grind; Duncan’s former partner who has mysteriously disappeared; cops with an agenda; and those ubiquitous harbingers of foul play, the Russian mafia. So when an arrest is made by a male colleague only halfway through the book, we know it is a set-up—but how, why and by whom? In the face of her colleagues’ hostility, it’s up to Mei to find out.
In this sense, the novel recalls fellow New Zealand writer Patricia Donovan’s Rita Vegas, and I venture to suggest that most, if not all, contemporary female-authored crime fiction is implicitly feminist, particularly when the sleuth is a woman up against a capitalist patriarchy and a misogynist police force. The feminist messages in See How They Fall are clear yet non-didactic. The story depicts sexism in male-dominated workplaces and the danger posed by rich, domineering husbands. Mei’s cynical yet funny delivery reflects frustrations many women will recognise, making her easy to empathise with, both because of and despite her flaws and occasional lack of dignity. The novel also explores human relationships in ways that are touching and unsentimental. It investigates the big things without judgement, such as the burden of guilt and mental illness, and how human beings can find ways to live a good life despite the obstacles. See How They Fall is partly psychological, with the narrators’ thoughts, emotions, memories and desires shaping both plot and the revelation of truth.
Serious crime fiction is now set across a wide range of social and cultural contexts, not just the upper-class locales favoured by popular crime writers of the mid-twentieth century. Modern readers seek realism with their escapism, culminating in a kind of wish fulfilment, where the rich and powerful do not get away with murder despite their lawyers and carefully constructed public images. In these post-Epstein times, readers are hungry for such outcomes.
Despite its thoroughly contemporary setting, See How They Fall follows a tradition stretching back to nineteenth-century literary crime writing, from Wilkie Collins to Edgar Allan Poe. Alongside its exciting storyline, there is lyricism in the narratives, particularly Skye’s, as she is ‘swallowed by a deep sea exhaustion’. Powerful allusions allow the reader to see into Skye’s apparently diseased mind, while Mei’s poetic descriptions evoke Sydney’s urban landscape, including a noirish wet night where ‘… black umbrellas unfurled along George Street like a colony of bats’.
In a recent article in The Post, New Zealand author Tom Baragwanath described ‘literary crime’ as a useful label, signalling ‘this is the kind of book where I might slightly ask more of the reader than your standard crime’. He suggests that literary crime is less preoccupied with big plot events on every page and more interested in unhurriedly exploring the mind of a character, with the mechanics of the story ‘still baked within that, but not every page is cranking the plot along’.
This is arguably the case in See How They Fall. The reader is invited to approach the story with an investigative mindset—something I would argue fans of the genre do instinctively—while also exploring the long-term impacts of early trauma and using the poetics of fiction to deliver a cracking storyline.
See How They Fall challenges the belief that crime fiction is not ‘real’ literature. In a discussion of the genre, reviewer Radha Vatsal cites Jorge Borges as a fellow crime fiction fan who argued that the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow is arbitrary, and that the constraints of crime fiction can spur creativity. When crime fiction is at its best, he suggests, the distinction between it and literature vanishes.
I like to think that Borges might have approved of See How They Fall. It fulfils the expectations of the traditional crime novel with all its restrictions while offering something more: a sophisticated storyline running alongside familiar conventions, believable characters, social commentary and psychological insight.
Despite this recommendation, the novel remains a middlebrow read—albeit a thoroughly enjoyable one—and will appeal to a wide range of readers. It exercises the brain and imagination without being overly taxing, delivering a satisfying plot and ending. I very much hope it is the first in a series starring Paris’s new heroine, Mei O’Connor.
PATRICIA McLEAN is a freelance writer and reviewer based in Dunedin. Her PhD from Victoria University examined constructions of masculinity in the novels of Maurice Gee. She formerly taught academic writing at Victoria and Massey universities.
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