Treen’s eyes looked dark, even the whites, as if all the black colour, all the bruising, had leaked through into the eyeballs.
‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen?’
Veronica Cruikshank’s son, Roland, is her idealistic one — affectionate, creative, vague, a fighter of lost causes. And he is her vulnerable one. The one who is never safe.
So when she hears he is back in Hobart, trying to help an old school friend, Treen McShane, Veronica is deeply worried.
Roland will not meet with her. She learns about him in distant glimpses and second-hand reports. She hears vague stories, of violence and horrific abuse.
Then Roland sends a text, asking Veronica to go to the Slipping Place, an old family picnic spot on the mountain. There she finds Treen’s frozen body.
Roland will be implicated in Treen’s death. If Veronica is to help him, she has to find out what really happened. She begins looking into the girl’s life, and the true nature of her connection to Roland and his old friend Paul. Soon she makes a discovery that will bring the violence right inside her own family circle.
The Slipping Place is about lies, secrets and unspeakable cruelty. It is about mothers and sons, unconditional love and bonds of blood. It is about the things we thought we knew and the things we miss.
And it is about a choice, a decision point, that is infinitely, vanishingly, terrifyingly small.
JOANNA BAKER 