Halfway through T Kira Madden’s debut novel, a cat wanders into a scene and observant readers will offer a wry smile to learn that she’s named Patricia, a nod to Patricia Highsmith, author of Strangers on a Train. The premise of that book is famous: two men meet, exchange stories, then agree to kill a person the other wants dead. With no motive, they’re sure they’ll never be caught. That novel haunts the opening pages of Whidbey, when a young woman, Birdie, encounters a man, Rich, on a ferry and expresses her wish that the man who raped her when she was a child and has continued to write to her since his release, would move to the next plane of existence. What’s his name, asks Rich, and she tells him. Calvin Boyer. Pretty soon, someone has made sure that Calvin won’t be communicating with any of his victims ever again.What begins as a homage quickly becomes something different, for it’s not the strangers on a ferry in whom Madden is interested, but Birdie and Mary-Beth, Calvin’s grieving mother, along with a third character, Linzie, who was supposedly another of his victims and has published a successful book about her teenage years.Moving back and forth between the three, one sympathises with Birdie, who’s struggled with her trauma, but it’s the unexpected compassion the author shows towards Mary-Beth that impresses. Clearly there’s nothing like a mother’s love, for despite his depraved behaviour, she’s never given up on her son and feels bereft by his loss. Only Linzie, along with her publicist Yale, comes across as two-dimensional, distracting from the other women’s stories.Curiously, we don’t meet Rich again until much later, and when we discover his true role in proceedings, it feels like something of a cheat. Direct addresses are made to the reader, and there are lists, which feel more like the stuff of teenage fiction than adult literature. Naturally some twists come, but they are of the “possible but improbable” variety, and lack the ingenious resolution of Highsmith’s work. Still, Whidbey has an undeniable page-turning appeal that might make it an entertaining holiday diversion. Just don’t strike up any conversations with strangers while reading it.John Boyne’s new novel, The Weight of Angels, will be published in September