Written by: Alex Green

“Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness,” Raymond Chandler wrote in The Big Sleep.

Yvonne Prinz’s gripping new novel If You’re Lucky takes place under fog that thins and thickens in both the city and the mind of its main character Georgia.

The city is small, Californian and coastal and it’s cleverly called False Bay. It’s where Georgia and her family live–well, at least what’s left of her family, that is.

Her charismatic older brother Lucky has recently drowned in a surfing accident in Australia and Georgia, along with her parents, are left to figure out how to fill the hole that Lucky’s absence has chiseled, crater-like, into their lives.

It turns out, as it always does, that that hole is unfillable and this sobering realization leaves the family stumbling through the fog trying to understand what their life will look like with Lucky no longer in it.

As Georgia tells us: “My brother squeezed his big world into our tiny house and made everything seem more exciting, but for me it was more than that. The thing I loved most about Lucky was that he made me feel normal.”

The grieving process gets interrupted by the arrival of Fin, a gypsy Jazz guitar-playing friend of Lucky’s who was there when he drowned and has come to False Bay to pay his respects to Lucky’s family.

Or has he?

Well, he has, but not exactly.

Georgia notices once Fin arrives, that he doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave False Bay and each day he not only assimilates more to the town, the people do the same to him, showering him with affection that, with no Lucky around, seems like the best place to put it.

When Fin begins a relationship with Lucky’s bereaved girlfirend, Georgia starts to sense something isn’t right.

But maybe everything is right and she’s the one who’s wrong.

Georgia still can’t believe an expert surfer like Lucky would ever drown and the sudden appearance of a guy who claims to have been one of his best friends but was heretofore unknown to her family, aroused her suspicions. When Lucky starts showing up in ominous, ghostly images, Georgia is sure the apparition is trying to tell her something about Fin. In an effort to find out exactly what, Georgia, who has been hearing voices and seeing things long before Lucky’s death, stops taking her medication so the pharmaceutical fog can clear and she can get a glimpse of the truth.

Or maybe she’s got that wrong and the truth can only be seen through that fog.

Or maybe it’s a little bit of both.

Or maybe it’s neither.

If You’re Lucky is a perfectly calibrated mystery that’s heart-racing, emotionally precise and spellbindingly good. Prinz writes with true velocity and in this book of secrets every page that turns cranks up the tension and every sentence pulls the suspense tighter.

The truth that’s lurking in False Bay is gripping and disturbing and well worth the foggy ride into the darkness.