The School Run is the third novel by Australian journalist and author, Ali Lowe. It’s late-October in the coastal Sydney suburb of Pacific Pines as parents and pre-teens gather at St Ignatius’ Boys’ Grammar School’s Gala Day to vie for a place in the next year’s enrolment. Iggy’s is private, exclusive, and offers prestige, sporting excellence, a university place in the bag, and of course the International Baccalaureate, which guarantees a boy’s acceptance to universities around the world: before the final selections are made, desperate parents go to untold lengths to see their sons admitted into this enviable fold.

Estella Munro has a daughter just about to graduate from Iggy’s sister school, Asher, and twin sons that she’s determined will go to St Ignatius’, so she’s not happy that her new neighbour on Ocean View Parade, Kaya Sterling has a young son who will be competing for a spot. Kaya claims to be the widow of a former Iggy’s school captain, but admits she’s an atheist, so her son’s baptismal classes are clearly a ruse. But there’s something that Estella doesn’t know about Kaya.

Estella’s best friend, Rebecca Lloyd also has a son hoping to enrol at Iggy’s, and a daughter just finishing Asher but, unlike Estella, she ha a close, friendly, supportive relationship with her daughter. Her business, Cakes by Bec, is going very well, but she dreads emails from a certain sender, surely spam, except that the sender seems to know too much about her.

And then, on the evening of the Gala, along the road that leads between town and Iggy’s, the School Run, a young man is hit by a car.

Lowe cleverly constructs her plot so that the identity of the victim is not revealed for quite some time, while the list of potential drivers seems to grow with every chapter, keeping the reader enthralled and the pages turning. Each of the main protagonists, and a few of the support characters, have secrets: in the aftermath of the Gala Day, there are even more secrets, and a number of them face dilemmas where doing the right thing wars with protecting their child.

Lowe easily evokes her setting and era, although, with the story set in or after 2023, attitudes to teen pregnancy, common sanitary products and mobile phones twenty-five years earlier are a few anachronisms that jar. Her characters are credible, their dialogue natural, and their reactions not unexpected. But she does throw in a few red herrings and twists to keep in interesting. Outstanding Australian crime fiction.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton.