3.5★s
The Woman Who Knew Too Little is the second novel by Australian screenwriter and author, Olivia Wearne. Having rejected several potential careers, Kitty Wheeler becomes a policewoman. It’s 1948, Adelaide, South Australia, and policewomen are afforded very little respect by their male colleagues. While she accepts that she’s expected to carry out mundane tasks like helping new arrivals off the train, moving prostitutes along from public places and walking night patrols, Kitty really wishes she could get her teeth into some proper policing.

In the early hours of December first, her patrol takes her past a suited man asleep on the promenade at Somerton Beach. When it later turns out the fellow is dead, and bearing no clues to his identity or manner of death, Kitty is hooked. She approaches the Detective Senior Sergeant in charge of the investigation, requesting to take part.

She often has to fit it in between her regular duties: checking marriage applicants are eligible, notifying index cases of their VD status, warning off scam psychics, handling domestic complaints and doing welfare checks; but she’s eventually assigned to checking missing persons files against the Somerton Man’s photo, and vetting the public who come to view the body, claiming to know his identity. All that leaves very little time for sleep. She comes up with a few suggestions, but never gets any credit, even when they yield results.

Meanwhile, at twenty-nine, Kitty is also resisting her regular suitor’s pressure to marry: that would mean the end of police work; and fending off flirtations from a Detective Constable involved in the Somerton case, and a lodger. She doesn’t really have time for a man: she just wants to solve this mystery.

Wearne’s depiction of era and setting is mostly accurate; the community mindset and the patriarchal attitude towards police women is well demonstrated. Anyone who knows the story of the Somerton Man will realise that no proper resolution of that case can be part of this story, so it really depends on Kitty’s role in that investigation, and her other activities being noteworthy enough to keep the reader interested: at times Wearne fails to do that and there’s a temptation to skim. This is sedately-paced historical crime fiction that may appeal to some fans of the genre.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and HQ Fiction.