Mystery Novel explores family dynamics, friendship, loss, grief, hardship, corruption, and human resilience: Flipped by Tracey Hawthorne

Title: Flipped

Author: Tracey Hawthorne

Publisher: Modjaji

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Flipped by Tracey Hawthorne is a South African mystery novel that follows multiple missing

persons cases in a small town, all interconnected by a single police officer. The story begins when two single mothers and close friends, Terry and Nicky, are thrown into panic when their teenage daughters fail to return home after a night out. The narrative shifts between the grieving mothers’ perspectives and that of the town’s officer, Captain Cupido, as both urgently search for clues surrounding the girls’ disappearance. In the novel’s second half, set more than six years later, readers meet a new cast of characters as Captain Cupido investigates another disappearance–this time, 29-year-old Imelda, whose husband, Dewald, is desperately searching for her. From start to finish, the chaos and emotional turmoil that strike when someone goes missing are written between the lines of a mystery that is both entertaining and heartbreaking.

Flipped opens with a thoughtful meditation on water, following the river’s flow through the

small town and reflecting on its influence and power over the townspeople. The opening section ends with: “The water roaring from the downriver side of the bridge, hurtling westwards towards the ocean, was deep, and it was moving at a rate of several hundred thousand litres a second” (p. 10). By beginning with the river’s currents, Hawthorne establishes a theme that threads through the novel as a central metaphor. This metaphor reappears in recurring imagery–torrential rainfall, floods, mist, drought, and dry riverbeds. Hawthorne presents water as both blessing and curse, a life-giving force that stands in contrast to the theme of death that echoes throughout the novel. Each character’s story, in some way, circles back to the river, underscoring the irony of water’s power to both sustain life and bring it to an end.

Hawthorne also plays with other natural imagery, most notably the persistent song of the

cicada. Cicadas surface across many chapters, marking the monotonous passing of time while also serving as a metaphor for life’s cycles. “This is what’s happening in the copse of eighteen bluegum trees where the little blue car is cradled, upside down, in its hammock of branches. It’s the immutable cycle of being. Beginnings and endings and beginnings; life and death, life and death, and life again” (p. 211).

Through these recurring natural images of water and wildlife, Hawthorne returns readers to the idea that we are all inseparable from nature, destined to return to the earth in the end.

The story unfolds through multiple perspectives–the investigating officer, grieving mothers,

worried spouses, slimy suspects, and even the missing people–giving a layered and complicated sequence of events. We see Terry, a divorced mother, coming to terms with the tense relationship between herself and her rebellious teen. We watch Nicky, a widowed alcoholic mother, grappling with losing her daughter after healing from the loss of her husband. We hear the voices of both spouses, Imelda and Dewald, as they regretfully reminisce on their time together, spent hustling for a future not promised. And we empathize with Captain Cupido as she juggles the town’s deadbeats and disappearances, all while handling her own impoverished situation. The novel connects characters through collective themes of family dynamics, friendship, loss, grief, hardship, corruption, and human resilience. Although the novel begins with rich character development, the final chapters move away from the intimate family perspectives, which may leave readers wishing for more emotional resolution.

While the second mystery ultimately resolves the first, the novel’s ending abruptly zooms out, offering little in terms of character resolution and leaving readers without closure for the characters they grew to care about in earlier chapters.

The novel delivers both drama and suspense, along with emotional depth and successful

character building. It’s a fast-paced, page-turning, and introspective mystery that intertwines human relationships and systemic failures. Hawthorne beautifully uses recurring natural metaphors–of water, cicadas, and cycles of life and death–to echo the characters’ struggles with loss, grief, and resilience.

While the ending may leave readers longing for more closure, Flipped ultimately reminds us that we might not always get the ending we long for but, like the river’s current and the cicada’s song, truth continues to surface and life inevitably moves forward.

Review by Britain Powers