Three Boys Gone - Mark Smith (2025)

 

Rating: Admirable

This is not going to be a typical book review, as, frankly, I’m just too knackered to concentrate on something like that. I’ve just spent the last two weeks (and it is ongoing) moving into my newly built home (a modern wooden Federation style weatherboard house). This involved lots of logistics, packing and then the actual shifting. Such is my dedication to physical media we moved forty-five boxes of books, twenty boxes of CDs and then packed, with the help of some friends, fifty-two boxes of vinyl records, which were then shifted by specialist removalists. Given it is also the end of the year (with all that December entails), and we are still setting up the new house, this will be brief.

Three Boys Gone is a library book club read and to make sure I was ready to lead the sessions I read it in advance, before all the house moving craziness begun. Therefore, I’m a bit hazy on the details, even though one of the meetings is today (I’ll fudge my way through if need be). The novel is the first adult fiction written by Mark Smith; he usually writes acclaimed YA fiction. It is a thriller about a school camping trip that goes terribly wrong. Whilst trekking along a remote beach three boys are separated from the main group and, for reasons never explained, run into the sea and are drowned. The teacher in charge, Grace Disher, is a witness, and as she decides to protect herself, she does not attempt to rescue them. The resulting outrage, hounding and bullying that follows makes for realistically harrowing reading. The novel is, in part, an examination of the pressures that can be brought to bear in our hyper-connected world. It is also a reasonably traditional thriller in that there is, of course, more to the story, typically leading to an extreme denouement. Three Boys Gone is quite well written, although Smith is not a great stylist, the writing is taut and impactful. Smith makes it easy to connect with Grace and her partner, Louise, who bear the brunt of the aftermath of the tragedy. If you are after a decent thriller written by an Australian author, then you could do far worse than Three Boys Gone. Now, it’s getting time to start unpacking those boxes of books, after I buy some more book shelves…