Bad Neighbours by Joanna Jenkins: Cleverly plotted mystery
Bad Neighbours by Joanna Jenkins is a cleverly plotted inner city crime mystery, and third title to feature her lead Ruth Dawson. Read my review.
Bad Neighbours Publisher Synopsis
From the bestselling author of How to Kill a Client and The Bluff comes a page-turning thriller of fraud and lies, murder and greed.
‘Come for the murder, stay for the almost-too-close-to-the-bone social satire. I loved it, but don’t tell my neighbours I said so.’ Jack Heath, author of Kill Your Husbands
‘Joanna Jenkins has written another cleverly constructed crime mystery with surprises, intriguing characters and humour to lighten the tension. Four stars.’Â Good Reading Magazine
Ruth Dawson finds her ideal living space in an Art Deco building in Potts Point, The Lumen. A twenty-minute walk from her office in the city, the apartment boasts parquetry flooring, a wall of books and Harbour Bridge views from the sofa.
It’s perfect until Ben, the homeless guy, dies under the corrugated iron lean-to in the garden where he lived.
The residents of The Lumen do little to hide their relief. They can cease their half-hearted attempts to find an acceptable solution to ‘the Ben problem’, and return to more important issues.
They’re not happy when Ruth brings in a detective. But she’s certain Ben was poisoned, and one of her neighbours knows it too.
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My Review
I came to Bad Neighbours with no prior experience of Joanna Jenkins’s work, and for a decent portion of the novel I was unaware I’d wandered into a series of sorts. It was only when the narrative referenced Ruth’s past dealings with a particular detective, with a familiarity that clearly had history behind it, that the penny dropped. A quick dive into the synopses of Jenkins’s earlier titles confirmed this was in fact the third book involving Jenkins’ feisty mid-life lead Ruth Dawson. Fortunately, Bad Neighbours is entirely readable as a standalone novel also.
I found Ruth Dawson easily likeable. She knows the corporate world intimately — how it operates, how to operate within it — but she’s far from beguiled by the people who populate it. That low-grade scepticism gives the novel’s narrative real bite, and it’s where Jenkins slips in her sharpest and most thought-provoking social commentary without lecturing.
There’s something inherently satisfying about a group of quite different but inherently like-minded people banding together to right a wrong, and Jenkins puts Ruth’s legal training and corporate diplomacy to good use here, alongside the research legwork of her support staff and the sharp instincts of her university-age son. What impressed me most, though, was the characterisation reaching well past Ruth. Given how many players this cleverly plotted crime mystery juggles, even the second- and third-tier characters are distinctly drawn — no mean feat — and that groundwork pays off handsomely, delivering more than one interesting twist in the unravelling that I genuinely did not see coming.
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Jenkins’s alternating character perspectives were reasonably well executed, though for me Bad Neighbours‘ tension and suspense didn’t properly ignite until its latter half, once matters turned personal for Ruth. I really enjoyed the dashes of literary flair that Jenkins has sought to weave into this narrative. One or two metaphors were a bit of a stretch, but they were certainly interesting. There were also reveals nearing the conclusion that felt slightly over-explained for my tastes. But these are all relatively minor niggles.
Overall, Joanna Jenkins’ Bad Neighbours is a clever inner city mystery thriller laced with social commentary, that works perfectly well as a standalone novel. But it’s worth noting, those without contemporary corporate or real estate world experience may find the character dialogue and inner thinking around certain story threads less meaningful and engaging than I did.
More fiction by Joanna Jenkins
More inner city mystery thrillers
Click on book covers for full reviews of each novel.