A gripping, haunting work about the reverberations of a serial killer’s crimes in the lives of everyday people.

In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged with a series of brutal murders of backpackers along a highway. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims’ families, but its impact travels even further – into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes.

Highway 13 takes murder as its starting point, but it unfolds to encompass much more: through the investigation of the aftermath of this violence across time and place, from the killer’s home town in country Australia to the tropical Far North, and to Texas and Rome, McFarlane presents an unforgettable, entrancing exploration of the way stories are told and spread, and at what cost.

From the acclaimed author of The Sun Walks Down and The Night Guest comes a captivating account of loss and fear, and their extended echoes in individual lives.

Published by Allen & Unwin

Released 2024

Highway 13 is a collection of twelve stories that are all connected in six degrees of separation fashion to the crimes of a serial killer, a fictionalised Ivan Milat, whose real-life crimes have been immortalised as the ‘Backpacker Murders’, here in Australia. This is not my usual sort of read, but sometimes a book gets so much attention and wins so many awards, that I am drawn to read out of my comfort zone.

‘I had some sense, then, of the energy she must have expended every minute of every day, sustaining the myth of herself.’

I really enjoyed the way Fiona McFarlane writes and am keen to read one of her novels at some stage. If you’ve read either of them, please do throw me a recommendation on which one to dive into. What I enjoyed most about these stories is that they were not about the killer, nor were they about the murders specifically. What they were about was the ripple effect on others, and in some cases, this was quite removed, but each of the stories contained a moment of recognition, an impacting connection of some sort.

Out of the twelve stories, two I didn’t enjoy quite as much as the others, and this was down to the way in which they were written. One was a stream of consciousness inside the characters head, no punctuation, no line breaks, just all of his thoughts running wildly out of his head onto the page. Stylistically, I get it, but it was exhausting to read. The other was a podcast episode, so it was basically a transcript of the conversation between the two hosts. I just couldn’t get into that. Podcasts are for listening to, they don’t translate to the page, in my opinion, but again, stylistically, I get why it was in there. The final story in the collection was stunning, an incredible one to finish on.

I highly recommend Highway 13, it’s easy to read each story in one sitting and despite what each story is springboarding off of, they are not difficult to read. These are stories about people, places, and the effect one person’s atrocities can have on a myriad of lives.