Book review: The Couples Retreat
Kangaroo Island once again proves a popular setting for an intrigue-filled page-turner with this White Lotus-adjacent murder mystery from Adelaide author Mercedes Mercier.
What is it about Kangaroo Island that has captured the attention of crime writers? Last year, Peter Papathanasiou in his thriller The Bolthole trawled through a smorgasbord of Island issues large and small including climate change, colonisation, clashes between locals and roadkill. Now Adelaide writer Mercedes Mercier has made KI the location of a boozy getaway by three men who were friends at university, and their socially competitive wives. It doesn’t end well, as we learn in the prologue that describes bodies on the floor, both glossy haired and suntanned, both dead.
The story unfolds through alternating viewpoints, although Mercier shares the perspective of Ashley, the nouveau riche odd wife out who is curvy and sexy and wears fitted clothes, in the first person, while Quinn’s chapters are descriptive with the young rookie policewoman as the focus.
Quinn is moving to Kangaroo Island to make a fresh start with her dog, Bodie, and eyes off the getaway group on the ferry, noting their hair looks the same shade of creamy blonde and their clothes are uniformly white and beige with flashes of gold jewellery. “It’s like a third-world country up here,” says one as she gingerly lowers herself into a moulded plastic seat. They are waiting for Ashley and, although Chelsea hates to gossip, she tells Kate that Ashley and her husband Nick were seen fighting earlier at the ferry terminal. It’s all a bit performative, Quinn thinks, and intercepts a glance Kate directs at Chelsea that reeks of pure hatred.
The group is staying at The Reef House, a luxurious rental with a private beach overlooking the mythical Paradise Bay. Ashley immediately decides it is a monstrous intrusion on the Island landscape while Kate, the social queen, loves it for its status as a luxury property. Kate has the weekend’s activities organised and the stream of cocktails, Grange and Dom Perignon unleashes all manner of bad behaviour.
You might like
This is cliffhanger storytelling with each chapter rising to a brief mini-crescendo; a bedroom occupied that should be empty, a light turning on and off, a woman drowning, the feeling of being watched but by whom? We quickly discover that each couple has an agenda although it takes a lot of salaciously bad behaviour for their true motives – and natures – to be revealed.
Ashley and Nick have a successful gymwear start-up in which Kate’s husband Hugh invested, and he never lets them forget it. Mind you, Ashley and Nick are hell-bent on sweetening Hugh up to get him to invest enough to move their company up to the next expansionary stage. Kate is meanwhile jealous of Chelsea and makes snide remarks about eating disorders and Ozempic track marks, unaware that her husband is upstairs forcing himself on Ashley after demanding his money back.
There is a lot going on in a class-envy, White Lotus kind of way, while in a parallel story Quinn is struggling to get on with her new boss, Skinner, an Islander who dropped out of a law degree in Adelaide to come home to his true love, KI. At least, that’s what the newspaper story said. Quinn has also discovered that leaving the past behind takes more than crossing a stretch of water and her controlling ex-boyfriend now knows where she lives.
None of this is particularly new but it works as a fast-moving and gossipy thriller with plenty to look, a dramatic momentum geared towards what happens on the next page, and – for a select few – a trip of self-discovery along the way.
The Couples Retreat (Penguin) by Mercedes Mercier is out April 14
Want to see more stories from InDaily Qld in your Google search results?
- Click here to set InDaily Qld as a preferred source.
- Tick the box next to "InDaily Qld". That's it.
Free to share
This article may be shared online or in print under a Creative Commons licence