One of the drawbacks to being a dedicated true crime reader is the acquired awareness that, regardless of the breadth of evidence presented to you, regardless of the many sad facts laid bare, there are just some moments in a person or a community's life which will always manage to evade a sense of justice, for which the ending (because do such moments ever really end?) will never satisfy, for which questions will always remain unanswered.

This case, as is so often true of crimes involving children, is one of those moments.

Helen Garner's THIS HOUSE OF GRIEF is creative/literary nonfiction at its finest, right up there with Truman Capote's IN COLD BLOOD in terms of style and tone. Honestly, I hesitate to call it "true crime"; a crime indeed occurs, but I'm not sure the crime or its particulars is actually the point. There's no whodunnit, no investigation. It's a case study in grief, misery, mental illness, and masculinity, encased in a courtroom drama. Garner chucks us in at trial level and presents us with only one set of divergent choices: either you believe that Robert Farquharson murdered his sons, or that he didn't. I can't say that I was especially persuaded by either side; if anything, the most convincing evidence for me was my own experience as a woman living in this world, which has granted me the knowledge that angry and rejected men often go to unthinkable lengths to hurt women who they believe have wronged them. Whatever happened in his car that Father's Day, Robert Farquharson is a pitiful creature.

Difficult book to read.
Thanks to author, publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book. While I got the book for free it had no bearing on the rating I gave it