Paul O’Connor takes a look at a recent literary thriller by Charlotte McConaghy, a noted Australian author with a strong interest in the environment and the effects of climate change, He warns: Don’t start this book if you don’t have time to finish promptly.
Reviewed by Paul T. O’Connor
WILD DARK SHORE. By Charlotte McConaghy. Flatiron Books. 320 pages. $28.99, hardcover. Also available in audiobook. MacMillan Audio.
When I start a thriller, I expect two things: A fairly certain goal for the protagonists, maybe saving the world from bad guys or finding a murderer. In short, what is this story about? And lots of twists – maybe the supposed bad guys are really good guys, maybe the bad guys are already one step ahead of the plan of salvation.
In Charlotte McConaghy’s 2025 thriller Wild Dark Shore, there are plenty of twists, for sure. But the mystery is: What’s this story about?
Don’t take that as a negative. It’s what draws you deeper into the pages, or in my case, farther along in the audiobook. I found myself stopping several times to reconsider just what the story was about: A love story, a murder mystery, an environmental dystopian narrative?
There’s a scientific research station on an island that lies halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica. It also serves as a seed vault, a bank that preserves thousands of seeds as a way of protecting earth’s biodiversity.
The book opens with a woman somehow awash in the waters just offshore the island lighthouse. She’s rescued and eventually recovers.
For chapters, we don’t know why she is there, if she will live, why there is a family living there other than to keep the lighthouse operating, and where the research scientists went.
We have so many questions none of us will dare stop reading. My neighbor read the whole book in one day while sitting on her porch.
Part of the mystery comes from the narration of the book. The washed-up woman, Rowan; the lighthouse keeper, Dom, and his three children all tell the story as they see it. We don’t know who is telling the truth, who is lying, who is merely mistaken and who else is as confused as I am.
One thing we do know: The island is to be evacuated because the rising ocean waters are about to swallow it. So, a relief ship is on its way; it should arrive six weeks after Rowan washes up. We also know that the rising ocean, and frequent storms, are destroying the few remaining manmade structures on the island, making the wait for the relief ship perilous.
Then there’s the twist as to why the relief ship can’t just come earlier. And there are twists about why the lighthouse keeper’s daughter won’t stay in the main living quarters but spends her nights at the beach among the island’s seals. (You learn a lot about seals and whales by reading this book.)
And if you want an entertaining primer on seed botany, there’s always the younger son, a grade schooler, who never stops talking about seeds and plants.
Of course, as the book progresses, we start to get a better idea of what the story is about, albeit with a few late twists.
I listened to the audiobook while walking or driving, which was a mistake, because road noise sometimes interfered and all the narrators are speaking with Aussie accents. So, unless you plan to listen in a quiet place, get the text version – if the line at your library isn’t 55 people long, as it was at mine.