Jacqueline Bublitz’s debut, Before You Knew My Name, was many things: a compelling crime story, a celebration of New York – a city that seems especially close to the Kiwi author’s heart – and a tale of self-discovery and female empowerment.
Leave the Girls Behind, which Bublitz describes as a companion rather than a sequel to her debut, expands on those themes, adds a side order of show tunes and doubles down on trauma. It also calls into question the culture’s lurid fascination with “dead girls”, a recurring theme in her debut.
Once again Bublitz highlights “the hierarchies of victimhood” where some receive scant media attention because of their race, social class or life choices. “Certain serial murder victims were considered ‘less dead’ than those victims whose lives before their deaths had been assigned a greater societal value … Only some deaths matter.”
Lead protagonist Ruth-Ann Baker is what you might call a citizen detective, directing all her energies outside of her bartending job at a trendy Manhattan bar to tracking down a serial killer. (Those wanting a real-life account of such obsessive sleuthing should check out Michelle McNamara’s chilling memoir I’ll Be Gone in the Dark.)
Ruth, whose backstory Bublitz reveals late in the novel, is on constant alert. She carries a lipstick stun gun and a can of mace for protection.
Others are worried about her obsessive behaviour, and she has seen therapists who tell her it’s a result of “unexamined trauma”, but nothing deters her.
Her focus is on a man – now dead – who was convicted of the murder of her childhood friend Beth. Ruth believes Beth’s killer had other victims, and after dropping out of college sets her sights on proving the theory.
Years pass, but when she hears that another young girl has gone missing from her old home town, she suspects Beth’s killer had an accomplice.
Her investigations are assisted by a cadre of dead women as well as members of an online site teeming with fellow sleuthing obsessives. As she did in Before You Knew My Name, Bublitz blurs the boundaries between real and imagined; murder victims are given a voice in the afterlife (the “girls” of the title) and become an integral part of the narrative. However, none have any memory of their own killing, one simply stating, “When you disappear like that … there are some things you need people to remember for you.”
The plot may seem at points unnecessarily complicated, as Ruth globetrots from New York to Auckland then to Melbourne and Oslo, ostensibly to record podcast interviews with the ex-partners of serial killers, who she believes may be complicit in their crimes. But Ruth’s determination is mirrored in Bublitz’s steely prose, only softening when writing about a possible love interest for her tormented heroine.
Before You Knew My Name, which dealt with similarly dark themes, had a lighter touch. However, this is a story Bublitz seems fully invested in (she has referred to it as the “novel of my heart” on social media).
What she’s given us is a tough, timely and uncompromising novel about male-on-female violence. Yes, the plot requires a few leaps of faith from readers, but those who go with it will be rewarded.
Leave the Girls Behind by Jacqueline Bublitz (Allen & Unwin, $37.99) is out 29 October.
