The Only One Who Knows

This evocative if unrelentingly grim thriller from Matlin (The Stranger Upstairs) follows Minnow Greenwood, a morning news anchor, as she returns home to a remote Australian fishing village and confronts her past after an on-air meltdown. A gruesome shark attack on the night of Minnow’s arrival signals that Kangaroo Bay has changed little from the violent enclave she fled years earlier. When a rival journalist arrives to investigate the shark attack and winds up chasing down details about other sordid episodes in the village’s past, Minnow’s hopes to privately reflect on the events that drove her from Kangaroo Bay are dashed. Instead, she’s forced to confront her memories of her abusive father and the violence she was involved with. The harsh poetry of Matlin’s prose makes palpable the ruthlessness of poverty and generational trauma, but she reveals the details of Minnow’s past too rapidly and confusingly in the novel’s second half, dulling the emotional impact and overcrowding the narrative with secondary characters. There’s beauty here, but readers may be reluctant to slog through the story’s excesses to find it. Agent: Naomi Davis, BookEnds Literary. (Mar.)