It’s been nearly a year since Beth’s friend Charlotte died, struck down by a car one October evening while out training for a marathon. Finally beginning to emerge from her cocoon of grief at both the loss of her friend and the following-hard-upon ending of her marriage to Rowan, and having been kept busy by the three young children she is now co-parenting, Beth starts to realise that some of the details about the night Charlotte died don’t add up. And so, seizing this newfound purpose, she begins to investigate what happened, running into odd behaviour, contradictory details, and plenty of unwilling witnesses along the way.

I can’t really do justice to Joanna Wallace’s second novel The Dead Friend Project (2024) in a pithy paragraph, but the simple truth is that, while sounding in no way like the sort of thing I should have any interest in — pushy mums who weaponise their children’s success, the school run, PTA meetings — I couldn’t be more delighted to have picked it up. It sounds like it should be ridiculously twee and cosy, but Wallace writes with magnificent honesty about the problems Beth faces, not least of which is how difficult it must be raising children: far from the adorable moppets of a much lazier book, Beth’s two young sons are filled with the contradictory spikiness of young children, including the sometimes savage simplicity with which they poke at the most hurtful of wounds (“Is this why Daddy went away? Because you’re so boring?”).

The fact is, Beth is struggling, and Wallace is to be commended for how unblinkingly she examines this, never playing it for cheap laughs. The book is bloody funny at times, but not in a way that mines reductive or obvious sources of humour, instead relying on some delightful wordplay or trading in superb contrasts that fill out the world of the other school mums who seem to be so much more up together than our protagonist (“It’s all going to be very light-hearted.”). Indeed, the one time I thought Wallace might have slightly overdone things by reaching for what verges on gross-out humour, she’s actually using contrast very effectively to set up a devastating surprise that I never imagined was coming.

And that’s another thing about The Dead Friend Project: it’s superbly structured, and reveals itself in the closing stages to be far more tightly and deliberately put together than its apparently freewheeling narrative would have you suspect. Reliant as she is on documentary evidence, Beth must piece together what people are able to remember and willing to talk about, and the natural way that her suspicions about Charlotte’s final evening coalesce should probably be studied for how efficiently and believably they’re achieved. This also serves a double purpose of sowing the seeds of suspicion about the group of mothers who form the core cast, and the more Beth learns, and the more unwilling everyone becomes to talk about it, the more you find yourself looking askance at these apparently blameless women.

It’s in Beth’s investigations that I can level one fault at this book, since while we’re undoubtedly kept informed of her suspicions, her means of exploring them mostly involves getting drunk and then scrawling her thoughts on a piece of paper, leaving it for her sober self to attempt to decipher.

“[S]ometimes I can’t seem to locate the one piece of information I need. But when I drink something magical happens because it’s there without me even trying to find it. But the problem is, I don’t always remember it. The next day, I mean.”

I’m such a fan of detection, especially amateur detection, that I feel a little like we’re missing out on something here, but it’s a minor point and one that pays off beautifully in the closing stages, not least because it throws out a possibility that’s completely, brilliantly horrifying and which you very nearly sail right past so cannily does Wallace drop it into the melee.

Additionally, this slight shortfall is made up for in something I don’t normally look for in my reading: the redemptive arc worked into the narrative via Beth’s friendship with Ana, the young mother who has moved into Charlotte’s old house. Again here Wallace is to be commended for never taking the easy option and for making both the scope of Beth’s difficulties and the impact they have on her life subtly apparent; and, through these challenges, what she develops with Ana, and where that positivity takes her, is really rather moving. The ending of chapter 25, for instance, felt so hard won that it slightly broke my heart. And how this feeds into the closing stages of the book, too, is quite simply exquisite.

I’m using my local library to read more modern crime fiction, and discoveries like this make me believe that the genre still has some brilliance left in it. In a milieu that positively screams out for easy cliché, Joanna Wallace has taken the hardest possible path by being never less than honest, and in doing so has crafted something really quite special. It is only my reluctance to read two books by the same author too close together that stops me from diving straight into her debut, the magnificently-titled You’d Look Better as a Ghost (2023), and it’s wonderful to think that I now have both that and Wallace’s future writings to look forward to.