Two years ago, debut novelist Jacqueline Bublitz made history. After more than fifty rejections, being dropped by one agent, many years of doubts, being told her novel writing wasn’t quite working, or was beautifully written but didn’t quite fit or wouldn’t sell, Bublitz stood onstage in Christchurch, having just received the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel from legendary Queen of Crime Val McDermid for Before You Knew My Name, her trope-busting debut that centred victims of crime and bystanders, rather than cops or killers.

It twinned nicely with the Ngaio for Best First Novel she’d won moments before – the only author to ever sweep both categories – and nicely complemented the two Davitt Awards and her 2022 General Fiction Book of the Year prize from the Australian Book Industry Awards.

Creating a bestselling, critically acclaimed, debut novel is extremely hard.

Following it up may be even harder, but Bublitz gives it a fair old crack with Leave the Girls Behind, another fascinating, character-centric thriller seemingly powered once more by Bublitz’s “feminism with a capital F”, and her rage at violence against women. Back in 2022, before the award wins – and a shortlisting for the prestigious CWA Gold Dagger in the UK (the only debutant, and only female author, shortlisted that year) – Bublitz told me New York-set Before You Knew My Name was her way of exploring “a very particular type of gendered violence and the impact that has both on the victim and the people around them”.

She continues that exploration in Leave the Girls Behind, in a slightly different way and with a different story, but some similar themes, in a familiar setting. To start with.

It’s 2015 in New York City. Hillary Clinton may make a presidential run. Months before, a girl named Alice Lee was murdered in Riverside Park. But the triggering news for bartender Ruth-Ann Baker is an alert that a young girl has gone missing from a town in Connecticut. Her hometown, the place she fled as a child after her best friend Beth was abducted and murdered by popular music teacher Ethan Oswald almost twenty years before.

Oswald died in prison, so he couldn’t have committed this new horror. But it stirs Ruth-Ann’s past trauma. She always felt Oswald had many more victims, and perhaps an accomplice. The local police in Connecticut, along with counsellors and her parents, didn’t believe her. Especially when she told them she was certain because of Beth’s ghost, and the ghosts of other murdered girls who visited Ruth-Ann, looking for help, looking for justice.

Could Oswald have had help? Is the current perp somehow linked to what happened many years ago? Or is it just geographic chance, compounded by voices in Ruth-Ann’s head?

Bublitz takes readers on an at-times bewildering ride into Ruth-Ann’s life, obsessions, and trauma, and across the globe as Ruth-Ann takes action, following tenuous leads to New Zealand and Norway, looking for links to Oswald and her ghostly girls. But is our unreliable narrator trying to help a missing girl in the present, ones from the past, or herself?

Comparison is the thief of joy, they say, and it may be a little unjust to hold Leave the Girls Behind up against the brilliant Before You Knew My Name, with the powerful voice of ‘pretty dead girl’ Alice Lee, even if many readers and critics reflexively do. Here it is Ruth-Ann and the women she visits and meets during her quest (including a rather unforgettable Kiwi teenager, the daughter of a babysitter killer), rather than her ghosts, that provide the greater fascination. Bublitz has a good touch for flawed characters, and the very human messiness of various lives, especially those suddenly upended by horrifying events.

Not everything can be resolved, or healed.

The storyline of Leave the Girls Behind often seems on a low simmer, like a great gumbo full of tasty ingredients that chef Bublitz is throwing in, and we’re waiting to see how it all comes together. Will the flavours mesh and deepen into something special? Like Creole cuisine, Leave the Girls Behind may divide opinion. An unusual crime tale full of empathy and stories of women in the orbit of men who kill, with a taste that lingers beyond the final page.

Reviewed by Craig Sisterson

Craig Sisterson is a lawyer turned features writer, reviewer, and editor. He is founder of the Ngaio Marsh Awards and series editor of the Dark Deeds Down Under crime and thriller anthologies. Craig grew up in Te Tau Ihu o Te Waka a Māui/The Top of the South, and currently lives in London.