The Ledge (Affirm Press 2024) is another outstanding crime thriller by the multi-talented Christian White. Known as the master of the twist (the reveal in his book The Wife and The Widow is still my all-time favourite), White’s work encompasses film, TV and novels.
Michael Robotham blurbed The Ledge as: ‘A coming of age story where not everybody comes of age’ which is an extremely clever way of describing this book. Told in two timelines, the present day and from 1999 (in diary form), The Ledge describes the tight friendship between four adolescent boys and the way they deal with an awful trauma they uncover. The current time sections include the boys – now men – dealing with the rippling aftereffects of that trauma decades later, when human remains are discovered in the local forest. Local police have no leads, except that it might be connected to 1999 when 16-year-old Aaron, one of the four friends, ran away from home. How that time is related to the grisly forest discovery is the cause of much rumour and speculation from the local community, and causes the former childhood friends to panic as they fear their secret may be discovered.
White writes with authority, taut plotting, good characterisation (lots of interesting backstories) and authentic dialogue. There are several great twists in this story and I was feeling quite smug because a couple of them I thought I had picked early on. This didn’t detract at all from the narrative because I was excited to see if I was right. But then White sucker-punched me with the major reveal which I completely did not see coming and made me realise my earlier surmises had perhaps been deliberately laid to lull me into a false sense of my own sleuthing abilities.
In any event, The Ledge is pacy, with edge-of-your-seat tension, and a final twist that will make you want to reread it again from the beginning to see what you’ve missed.