Editor and novelist Lyn Yeowart returns with a highly addictive new thriller. It’s 1961, regional Victoria. Near the city of Horsham is Harrowford Hall, a notorious and shame ridden home for girls who find themselves pregnant out of wedlock. It’s run by the tough-as-nails Matron, Mrs Denise Montague. She has little sympathy for her charges, and treats them to Dickensian conditions. One of her sidekicks, nurse Stella Chapman, is equally hard on the girls. When fourteen-year-old Jane McEvoy becomes pregnant, her mother has a meltdown and at their doctor’s recommendation, sends her off to Harrowford Hall. The adults hope the whole affair can be covered up with some concocted story about visiting a sick relative and no-one need ever find out about the pregnancy. But Jane’s life soon turns into a living hell.
Fast forward to 1973 and nurse Stella Chapman’s body is found. She’s been murdered, just days before Harrowford Hall had closed its doors for good. Detective Sergeant Eleanor Smith, on her first murder case in which she has to prove her capability to her misogynist supervisor, is assigned to the case. But as events unfold it turns out not to be a single murder that needs solving, but a pandora's box of secrets and lies.
Lyn Yeowart’s follow-up to her acclaimed debut thriller, The Silent Listener, is a brilliant page-turner that maintains its atmosphere of suspense and dread right up to the very end. The plot is expertly designed like a ticking time bomb, with breathtaking twists and turns. Based on extensive research and first-person testimony, it’s also an angry indictment on the appalling treatment of young women in the past and the culture of misogyny that enabled it. The seriousness of the book’s themes is leavened with some comic moments, notably the dialogue between hardboiled Detective Eleaonor Smith and her novice assistant constable.
A stunning thriller that also addresses outrageous historical wrongs.
The Hollow Girl, by Lyn Yeowart. Published by Penguin. $34.99
August 2025
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