By Fiona Hardy
Publisher: Affirm Press (Simon and Schuster)
Review by Carol Woeltjes
Now I think we can all get behind the idea that stealing the body of a deceased person, whether they be a celebrity or not, is going a bit too far, but what about if its ashes, in a decorative vase just sitting on the mantelpiece. Totally different right?!
But what would be our motivation? Revenge, blackmail, love, desperation or plain and simple perversion. All these options are on the table when Teddy and Alice are asked to find the ashes of a long-dead celebrity tennis player, Perry Perrineau, whose ashes usually reside in the home he shared with his husband, but have vanished from the aforementioned mantelpiece.
Old Games by Fiona Hardy is the second novel to feature Teddy and Alice, a slightly dysfunctional but completely compatible duo with troubling histories, a complicated present and an ardent, co-dependent dynamic.
Now I kinda love Teddy and Alice, but to begin with I wasn’t sure I could trust them. They have a questionable relationship to the law and rather flexible moral and ethical standards. But they are the good guys, unlike some of the people they are forced to interact with when trying to find Perry’s ashes.
It seems that everyone has a story to tell, some of these stories are even true or hold grains of truth and it’s here that Hardy’s own storytelling skill comes to the fore. She masterfully blends and weaves the truths and half-truths until I was thoroughly engrossed, but completely flummoxed as to who has made off with Perry. Thankfully Teddy and Alice are better detectives than I am.
But now, back to the empty space on the mantelpiece in need of dusting and acting as a constant reminder of who/what is missing. For me this distinction between the who and what became a niggling question: at what point does a person’s body go from being a subject to being merely an object? I may be getting a bit too philosophical, but this kept playing on my mind as I read. Who would steal a person’s ashes and are ashes different to a body and once you’ve stolen the ashes what do you do with them? I guess this comes back to your motivation.
As you can see Old Games had me asking questions not just about who stole Perry, but about morality, motive and personhood. I was forced to question everything and feel fear and sadness alongside joy. Given Old Games is the second novel to feature the antics of Teddy and Alice there are allusions to what came before, but there is nothing that would spoil the first, Unbury the Dead, in fact there may be just the right amount to get you picking up a copy of that too.
Publishers blurb
A pacey, off-beat Aussie crime story about two best female friends and investigators unravelling the private lives of Melbourne’s celebrity sportspeople.
Morally flexible best mates and private investigators Alice and Teddy pride themselves on fixing every kind of mess imaginable, no questions asked. So, when they’re tasked with locating the recently-stolen ashes of long-dead celebrity tennis player Ashley “Perry” Perrineau, it should be a routine job.
But it quickly becomes clear that everyone who knew Perry is keeping secrets: his accountant despises Perry’s widower; the sculptor of his statue is hiding something in her studio; his ex-doubles partner is a compulsive liar; and his mother is obsessed with preserving his legacy and her image at all costs.
Alice and Teddy will need to travel up and down Melbourne’s Mornington Peninsula – all while avoiding more than one person on their tail – to uncover the truth and keep the body count from rising. But will they and the people they love survive what they find?