Angel Rock

Publishers Weekly

This assured, often heart-stopping second novel from Australian writer Williams marks his U.S. debut, and it's sure to garner lots of attention. Tom Ferry, a likable 12-year-old, and his four-year-old brother, Flynn, get lost after Tom's womanizing stepfather, a logger named Henry Gunn, chooses pleasure over parental responsibility and abandons the boys at his work site. The tiny town of Angel Rock is stunned by their disappearance, and another disaster quickly follows when the body of Tom's friend Darcy Steele is found after her apparent suicide. Sheriff Pop Mathers's investigation hits a dead end, but an out-of-town detective named Gibson follows up and delves into the hornet's nest of jealous rivalries that lurks beneath the surface in the small town. The mystery is deepened when Tom Ferry returns without his brother in tow, but the boy is too traumatized by his week in the outback to provide details of what has happened to Flynn. Mathers once again comes up short in his efforts to find the boy, but Gibson continues to dig until he discovers a bizarre quartet of low-life oddballs whose connections to Tom, Darcy and Mathers's daughter Grace slowly begin to tie the two crimes together. Williams deliberately keeps his prose and action low-key in the early going, relying on details of both scene and character to add tension as he brings his outstanding ensemble to life in a unique and compelling setting. The shocking ending packs a major wallop, establishing Williams as a writer with a formidable array of skills, including the ability to twist both his plots and the genre in some startling, unexpected directions. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A week after Tom Ferry and his four-year-old half-brother, Flynn Gunn, get lost in Angel Rock, a town in the harsh Australian outback, only Tom returns, with no recollection of what happened. Around the same time, Gibson, a Sydney detective with a drinking problem, is called to investigate the suicide of Darcy Steele, a young girl from Angel Rock who reminds him of his sister, also a suicide. Upon his arrival in Angel Rock, Steele learns of the Flood family history: both Darcy's and Flynn's fathers were rivals for Annie Flood, who drowned. Angel Rock is the huge rock that peers over the town; like many of the characters in the book, if looked at in the right light and with a little imagination it looks like an angel. But Williams (Swimming in Silk) creates a feeling that everyone is being watched and that only by digging deeply into the past will the answers to these multiple mysteries emerge. Gibson finally understands what happened to his sister as the truth about Annie Flood, Darcy Steele, and Flynn Gunn comes to light at the stunning climax of this suspenseful work. Recommended for most collections. Josh Cohen, Mid-Hudson Lib. Syst., Poughkeepsie, NY Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The disappearance of a four-year-old boy in the menacing bush country is the catalyst for this engrossing melodrama-its author's second novel, and winner of the Australian/Vogel Literary Award. Williams focuses initially on 12-year-old Tom Ferry, the de facto guardian of his younger stepbrother Flynn-and the object of both parental scorn and his own agonized guilt when, upon returning home after a day at work with his stepfather (Flynn's father), Tom's attention is distracted by a wounded kangaroo, and Flynn is nowhere to be seen, shortly thereafter fully lost. A widespread search for both missing boys brings Gibson, a burnt-out Sydney detective, to Angel Rock, after Tom had stumbled alone into a neighbor's yard, exhausted and distracted, unable to remember anything beyond hazy impressions of a "figure without a face" lurking in the trees, watching the two brothers. Williams squeezes maximum tension from this arresting premise, expanding the focus to explore the histories of several variously connected Angel Rock families, and linking Flynn's disappearance to the suicides of two local girls: one a runaway to Sydney, the other the daughter of a fundamentalist family whose secrets are concealed in the religious colony known as New Eden. The novel also offers an appealing picture of the likable Tom Ferry's conflicted approach to maturity (his scenes with a grandmotherly storekeeper and with the adolescent daughter of a stoical police sergeant are especially striking), which balances and helpfully vitiates the cliched portrayal of Gibson, an alcoholic loner pursued by his own family ghosts and personal demons. And the image of the craggy landmark for which Angel Rock is named—a lonely eminence where spirits seem to walk—draws the story's sprawling webwork of myths and legends, secrets and lies to it like a powerful magnet. Another in the growing list of intriguing and accomplished novels from Down Under, and a welcome US debut.