Shooting Star

Australian crime fiction writer Peter Temple’s detective thriller Shooting Star (1999) tells the story of the Carson family, an incredibly wealthy and privileged clan facing a nightmare—the kidnapping of the teenage granddaughter of the family’s patriarch. Anxious to get her back, they hire private investigator and hostage negotiator Frank Calder to execute the kidnapper’s demands. However, as Frank digs into the family’s history to piece together why the young girl would have been taken in the first place, he finds closets full of skeletons, horrible secrets, and unimaginable dysfunction.

A quick warning before the summary continues—the novel features extreme violence towards women.

Frank Calder, an ex-soldier whose post-military career as a police hostage negotiator ended after he got into a physical altercation with a sadistic fellow officer, now works as a private mediator. Outwardly a hardened loner, on the inside, he nurtures demons from his military days and is plagued by constant self-doubt. When the novel opens, Frank has just taken a job with the very rich Carson family—they need Frank to negotiate with the kidnappers who abducted 15-year-old Anne Carson on her way home from school.



At first, the kidnapping seems like an opportunistic cash grab, and those responsible demand $1 million dollars ransom. Frank’s first instinct is to go to the police, but the family’s patriarch, Pat Carson, explains that they don’t want the police involved. A decade ago, when another Carson teenager, Alice, was abducted, the police only escalated the situation until the kidnappers threatened to kill her. Luckily, in that case, Alice managed to escape her captors—but now the concern is that involving the police will again only create problems.

Against his better judgment, Frank goes along. However, when he brings the money to the agreed-on spot, the kidnappers tell him to just throw the money off a balcony into a crowd of people below.

Together with his army buddy and colleague Orlovsky, Frank starts investigating the Carson family. The 80-year-old Pat Carson is a self-made man who rose “from penniless immigrant builders’ laborer to millionaire property developer before he was forty,” a trajectory only possible because Pat is “the most ruthless…, the worst…, the most sinister person in construction.” His children and grandchildren have grown up indulged and spoiled in the Carsons’ luxurious, secure compound. Given the safety precautions, that anyone would have been able to get to either Alice or Anne is surprising.



Frank does his best to untangle the complicated web of businesses, professional obligations, personal rivalries and alliances, and marriages and affairs of the Carson clan. With each piece of information he uncovers, it becomes increasingly clear that the Carsons have used their money and power to shield themselves from the consequences of evil and nefarious actions. Despite lots of anecdotal evidence that many of the Carsons have committed all sorts of crimes, nothing has ever been proven in court against any of them. This means that they have accumulated many enemies over the years, and so the kidnappings could be retribution from a variety of sources.

As Frank and Orlovsky investigate, they are racing against the clock. The kidnappers have threatened to kill Anne and have sent her severed finger to the Carsons as proof.

Eventually, Frank stumbles onto a helpful lead when he researches the voice-altering computer program the kidnappers use to communicate. This software hasn’t yet been released to the market, so those who have access to it must be both technologically savvy and highly connected. Frank now realizes that the kidnapping has nothing to do with bilking the rich family. Instead, it must be personally directed at the Carsons. He also suspects that the two kidnappings are related, even though they happened a decade apart.



Amid the many seedy red herrings, Frank eventually uncovers the truth. Mark Carson, one of Pat’s sons, finds perverse pleasure in hurting women and girls. At some point, he killed a very young nurse named Anthea Wyllie—a murder that he covered up by buying the silence of the few men who could have put him behind bars. Nevertheless, rumors about his predilections circulate in elite circles.

Several years later, a classmate of Alice Carson, Cassandra Guinane disappeared without a trace. Her twin older brothers, horrified that they had missed signs that she was getting involved with the much older Mark, decided that he must have killed Cassandra. As revenge, they kidnapped Alice, intending to torment and kill her as retribution to the untouchable Carson family. This plan failed when Alice escaped, but they never gave up the idea. Now, they’ve been more successful, as the horrified family finds out when the corpse of Anne is found at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

Frank eventually puts these pieces together and locates the twin Guinane brothers. Through subterfuge, he confirms that they are responsible. One of the rooms of their house has been converted into a shrine to Cassandra. Another houses the computers they used to run their voice changing software. A third is where they tortured and killed Anne. Knowing that they have been found out, the twins kill themselves. A disgusted Frank knows that this is where the case ends—Mark Carson will never come to justice.



Temple’s novel won the Ned Kelly Award for Best Fiction. As Keir Graff writes in a review for Booklist Online for the American Library Association, “Temple lights our way with economical beauty, turning phrases like a craftsman…Shooting Star should be added to the to-be-read piles of thriller fans.”