Explosion

by P. C. Wren

First published 1935

Amazon

2.5(5)

A sudden explosion tears through an apparently ordered colonial community and exposes conflicts that had been concealed beneath routine, hierarchy and social politeness. The investigation must determine whether the catastrophe was accident, private revenge or political violence, but every explanation threatens people who have reasons to distort the past.

Wren builds the novel around the shock wave that follows an act of destruction: suspicion spreads faster than evidence, and official certainty becomes dangerous when it is shaped by racial and class assumptions. The mystery therefore concerns not only who caused the explosion but how a colonial society decides whose testimony counts and which motives it is prepared to imagine.