Eight old friends and a gaggle of kids. A weekend away in the group’s recently purchased rural retreat. Simmering tensions, old and new. And the stage is set for Kate Mildenhall’s new literary thriller, The Hiding Place.

Review: The Hiding Place – Kate Mildenhall (Simon & Schuster)

The Hiding Place is Mildenhall’s first foray into the genre, after her earlier works of historical and science fiction, but she is clearly at home. Many Australian thrillers draw on the tradition of the Australian Gothic, in which the land symbolises the colonial fear of the Other. Mildenhall inverts this expectation. In her novel, the people are the threat – to the environment and to each other.

The Hiding Place follows a group of friends who jointly purchase an abandoned mining town called Willow Creek, with the ambition of transforming it into their own private Eden, a place to escape the urban rat race. But from their leader Lou’s first introduction of the idea, we can see the falsity, the performativity, of their motivations. Lou shifts her strategies of persuasion, appealing to each friend’s personal values.

“It’s a place to protect,” she tells one. “We’ll be caretakers, stewards.” She tells another that it is “somewhere for the family as they grow together, a legacy”.

Each argument is carefully designed to help Lou realise her ideal of family values. She desires a place to nourish her children with organic food and an organic lifestyle, untainted by screens and the demands of modern life. But the friends........

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