After a career as a trade envoy and lobbyist across Asia, author Sam Guthrie is perfectly positioned to bring the business and diplomatic ties between Australia and China to life in which to situate his story, and both the premise of his conspiracy thriller and his prose as a writer stack up to the expertise in his worldbuilding.
The Peak is a propulsive and digestible read, starting off with a shockingly violent act and ratcheting up the paranoia and tension from there.
Charlie is a political fixer who thinks he knows everything about his childhood best friend, ministerial hopeful Sebastian, who he manages. But secrets actually abound thanks to their shared history with a Chinese girl they both fell in love with decades before, prompting a series of falling outs, betrayals, long absences and more secrets than either Charlie (or you) can count.
Taking place over a tense day and a half in a Parliament House meeting room, the suburban and rural streets of Canberra and a few other locations Charlie visits and retreats from in haste, it’s a Hitchcockian tale where the story’s already played out, leaving Charlie to discern the multilayered truth not only while the security forces of both Australia and China are gunning for him but after a massive cyberattack has seen transport and power in both Sydney and Melbourne grind to a halt.
It’s all wrapped up in the fate of the girl they both loved a lifetime before, a mixtape made during a youthful infatuation, a shared childhood of abuse and bullying and friends and enemies alike who’ve swirled around Charlie’s life since.
At times it’s a little challenging to figure out who’s speaking, who the action is centred on and why it’s broken at that particular point by Sebastian’s voice on a 90s-era cassette, and even though the cover promises ‘one secret to end the world’, Guthrie seems to have stretched that creative mission statement to breaking point – every chapter contains another mike drop revelation to the extent they become a bit of a blur.
But it’s an accessible read that effectively entwines a global political conspiracy with a tale of youthful idealism shattered by heartbreak and if you have a quiet weekend you’ll breeze through it in just a couple of sessions.
Fingers crossed a streaming service steps up to snag the rights, and hopefully Guthrie doesn’t have any holidays booked in China anytime soon.