Zane Lovitt won the Ned Kelly Award for best debut fiction for his series of connected short stories Midnight Promise in 2013. He followed this up in 2016 with the darkly comical Black Teeth. In 2025, Lovitt returns with something different again, continuing a recent Australian crime fiction trend to focus in on the suburbs in The Body Next Door.
The Body Next Door is set in a cul de sac in Melbourne’s suburbs. Many of the residents have lived in their houses for years and everyone knows everyone else and still remember the events of thirteen years before when a young man was found dead in the subfloor of one of the houses. When Claire Corral goes missing, memories of that earlier murder come to the surface, and for readers they are brought to life by entries from a diary that Claire just happened to start keeping just before the event. Paired with Claire’s narrative is main character Jamie, who has moved home following a divorce to care for his ageing father who is suffering from dementia. Jamie is keen to help solve the mystery of Claire’s disappearance but also finds himself interested in new neighbour Tess, who has secrets of her own.
The Body Next Door works in the nosy-neighbour/amateur detective mode. In the diary entries, Claire believes that she has the answers to the mystery of the dead teen and does her own ham fisted investigation. Meanwhile, and for similar reasons and due to some of his father’s outbursts, Jamie also feels like he has enough of a stake in Claire’s disappearance to ask around. This allows Lovitt to make wry observations about suburbia and the types of people who live there but does not create an engaging or particularly believable mystery.
The use of the two timeframes is fine (if currently overused in crime fiction). But the idea that one of the characters just started writing a diary in which she records literally everything about her life as it is happening just as something interesting has occurred stretches belief more than a little. And the solution to all of the mysteries is head-scratchingly underwhelming, making less sense the more you try and think about it.
Australian suburbia seems to be the latest stop for local crime writers after the bush. Which is not a surprise since plenty of Australian true crime is already focussed on the suburbs. Recently, Australian Writers like Christian White (Wild Place) and Maryrose Cuskelly (The Campers) have gone there. But in order to make it interesting, the story has to be more than just Neighbours-plus-a-murder. The Body Next Door never quite gets beyond this, and while it can be breezy and charming, it never really succeeds in being much more.
The Body Next Door by Zane Lovitt
One Comment
Good review.