Australian writer Vikki Petraitis is best known for her true crime books. These include the bestseller The Frankston Murders about Melbourne serial killer Paul Denyer and her celebrated debut, 1993’s The Phillip Island Murder. Her work not only reports on the justice system but has influenced it directly. Her podcast on the Frankston case brought renewed attention and led to Denyer being denied parole.
Her turn to fiction is more recent, beginning with 2022’s The Unbelieved, which was written as a PhD project and won a crime fiction prize. A strident, issues-based rural noir, it dealt with sexual assault, misogyny and victim blaming.
The Stolen, which is based on an article Petraitis read about a baby who was taken by its father and never found, continues in that vein. It again features Antigone Pollard, a resilient, tough-minded martial arts-trained detective who has returned, in difficult circumstances, from Melbourne to her childhood home in coastal Victoria, a tourist town whose innocent exterior masks darker elements.
Alongside her is her trusty police dog Waffles and a detective partner nicknamed Wozza, whose crime-solving skills match his appetite for cakes and muffins.
When a seven-month-old baby is kidnapped by a disgruntled father, Antigone finds herself heading the manhunt. Soon after, her boss dies in a suspicious car accident while on her way to Antigone’s rural home. That means the return of a particularly troublesome boss who insists the investigation proceed on his terms.
The resulting media scrum reveals a deep seam of misogyny in the community, many pointing fingers at the baby’s mother and labelling her supporters “virtue signallers”, while some journalists question whether the baby had in fact been taken at all.
Petraitis includes transcripts of a sensationalist right-wing talk-back radio station complete with a host who says things like, “In my day, hysterical women could pop a Valium and have a strong cup of tea and a lie down.”
Alongside this narrative runs another mystery involving the existence of a possible sibling for Antigone, after her mother reveals she gave birth in a hospital that has since been under investigation for selling newborn babies and telling the – usually single – mothers their child had died in childbirth.
The resourceful Antigone is clear-eyed throughout about the evil she encounters. “The word deserve came up a lot in my job. Humans seemed to have a need to weigh each atrocity and attribute percentages on what people ‘deserved’. But when you see these things day in, day out, you realise that no one deserved the bad things that happened to them. Small words had such big meanings.”
It’s clear Petraitis’s fiction is a landing place for some of the frustrations and injustices she has seen throughout a career that has allowed her an up-close view of the Australian justice system and the often unfortunate way it treats victims, especially women. That means the novel does feel a little didactic at times, where Petraitis’s advocacy, well intentioned though it is, gets in the way of the storytelling. For the most part, however, The Stolen is a solid sequel to The Unbelieved, Petraitis’s sense of humour lightening some of the darker moments.
The Stolen, by Vikki Petraitis (Allen & Unwin, $37.99), is out now.
