Dignity for the dead girl

At 11.34pm on March 25, 2020, the evening the country would go into lockdown at midnight, Jacqueline Bublitz took a call in New Plymouth, where she lives, from a woman in the United Kingdom. The woman said: “You won’t believe this but…”

There is still a sense that Bublitz doesn’t quite believe this because “this” meant her life changed overnight. The “this” was the result of a bidding war for her first book, Before You Knew My Name. Instantly, she went from being unemployed to being able to write full-time, which you can see would really be life-changing. She says she can’t reveal how much she got, but that it wasn’t a million. “Ha, ha. No, I’m waiting for the movie deal for that.” Enough to buy a house? “Oh, who does these days?”

She was joking about the movie deal, but she may well get that, too. Her book, which was six years in the writing, is terrific. It’s a sort for the MeToo age. It is, says Bublitz, “very much a homage” to Alice Sebold’s , which she loved. “It was one of the first books I read that subverted the crime book.”