Highway Thirteen

June 10, 2024
In these eerie and insightful linked stories, McFarlane (The Sun Walks Down) explores a serial killer’s rampage and its impact on an Australian community. The volume opens with “Tourists,” which takes place in 2005, nearly a decade after the killings that have since made Barrow a tourist destination for true crime fanatics. There, a local woman tells a coworker she can sense the presence of a victim whose body is yet to be discovered. McFarlane then rewinds to 1996 with “Hunter on the Highway,” when hitchhikers are turning up dead and the killer is at large, prompting a young woman to wonder if her boyfriend is the culprit. In “Democracy Sausage,” set in 1998, a political candidate’s chances for victory are dashed because he shares the surname of the man recently charged with the killings, taxi driver Paul Biga. Media coverage of the case gets further explored in “Fat Suit,” about an actor made up to look like the corpulent Biga for a salacious 2024 biopic. McFarlane beautifully renders the ways in which news of the crimes warps some of her cast’s relationships and causes other characters to slip into obsession. It’s a standout meditation on a community’s legacy of violence. Agent: Stephanie Cabot, Susanna Lea Assoc.

July 1, 2024
A fictional Australian serial killer is at the heart of this remarkable collection of 12 linked stories--yet he is not actually featured in any of them. The stories are told from the viewpoints of a disparate collection of characters who encountered him before, during, and even long after his crimes. There are the next-door neighbors who watch as, years later, his house is demolished. A glamorous retired flight attendant who tries to prevent her naive younger sister from marrying him. The famous actor who struggles with wearing the fat suit he needs to portray the killer in a hit streaming series. The true-crime podcasters who delve into his crimes decades after his death. We meet his mother as a young girl and the Catholic school scholarship student who was the only known victim to escape him. Each story in McFarlane's second collection (she's also written two novels, most recently The Sun Walks Down, 2023) stands alone beautifully. Woven together, they illustrate the long-reaching, often unexpected ripple effects evil has on every life it touches.

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Starred review from July 15, 2024
McFarlane contemplates the ripple effects of violent crime in 12 intricately layered stories based on an actual string of serial killings in 1990s Australia. The diverse stories travel across decades and continents. The criminal investigation never becomes the central plot; the killer himself, here called Paul Biga, remains offstage while his victims appear only in fleeting mentions or glimpses. The protagonists' connections to the crimes range from close to barely tangential. Timing matters, one story traveling back to 1950, when Biga's future mother is 8 years old, another heading forward to a 2028 true-crime podcast. The opening story introduces the crimes' physical reality, following a reluctant visitor to the forest where Biga's victims had been found years earlier and where a sense of evil, and sexual, possibility still pervades. In 2003, an elderly woman's lingering shame over her adolescent love for another girl resonates more powerfully than her more recent memories of Biga as her neighbor. Secret sexuality permeates characters' lives, as does paranoia. Readers share a young woman's growing fear in 1996 as she follows news reports that reveal a disquieting number of traits her boyfriend shares with an unidentified killer on the lam. Is it protective or paranoid maternal instinct pushing another woman to warn her younger sister against marrying a vaguely creepy boyfriend a decade earlier, in 1986? McFarlane uses the adventures of British schoolgirls in 1995 Rome to create misleading fear and tension before revealing a character who symbolizes resilience in the book. The travails of a politician unfortunately named Biga running for office four days after Paul Biga's arrest offers discomforting comic relief. Given the large role media influence plays throughout, inevitably a television series about Biga shows up in 2024. So does Covid-19 in 2020, putting into perspective a single serial killer's insignificance in a world reeling with global crises. However entertaining, McFarlane's stories continually remind readers that behind true-crime stories' escapist pleasure exist real death and human pain. Addictively engaging, profoundly serious fiction from an underappreciated master.

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