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Abroad

Veteran Member
The blurb on the back of the book describes it well:

In 2004, the body of a young Perth woman was found on the grounds of a primary school. Her name was Rebecca Ryle. The killing would mystify investigators, lawyers, and psychologists - and profoundly rearrange the life of the victim's family.

It would also involve the author's family, because his brother knew the man charged with the murder. For years, the two had circled each other suspiciously, in a world of violence, drugs, and rotten aspirations.

A Murder Without Motive is a police procedural, a meditation on suffering, and an exploration of how the different parts of the justice system make sense of the senseless. It is also a unique memoir: a mapping of the suburbs that the author grew up in, and a revelation of the dangerous underbelly of adolescent ennui.

I read a lot of true crime, but this one stirs me to recommend it particularly for the compassionate description of all the victims, living and dead. How does one even start dealing with grief that raw? How does one articulate the loss and go on living in the house that used to shelter a whole family and now is missing one of their number?

The book leaves me with a huge respect for the strength and honesty of the survivors of this crime, sympathy for the people caught up in the fringes of it and an interesting side light on a feature of the Reality Bites forums of this website. Does this look familiar to you, too?

The Ryles are conservative - they have faith that traditional institutions confer civic stability and coherence. They are not slavish in their beliefs, are both wary of the misuse of power and the indelicacy of justice. But they are both monarchists, for instance, and Fran [the father of Rebecca] speaks often about the essential elegance of the Magna Carta and the Westminster system. But when Rebecca died, Fran became soaked in a murderous reverie. It disturbed his conception of himself as a gentle man, and it disrupted his belief in a tradition of impartial justice.

There was one prominent fantasy, as specific as it was brutal. It played repeatedly in his head, as if animated by something independent of him. Fran kidnaps Duggan [the killer of Rebecca] - assisted by chloroform and ropes - and dumps him in the boot of a car that also contains the tools for his torture. Saws, pliers, hammers. Maybe a blowtorch. Then Fran drives out to the bush. En route, Duggan regains consciousness but not his freedom, bound and panicking in his dark cell. He wonders, will I be killed or just injured? And would be guess the identity and motivation of his captor as the car speeds over the gravel roads?

The fantasy goes on for a while in that vein and it gets rather bloody.

And then some time later, someone actually offers Fran to have something permanently done about Duggan.......

But the book is not about the murderer, though it does probe his shallows as far as they go. It is about what a violent act does to a community of mostly decent, hard-working people, and it is extremely well written.
 
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