Not quite as good as her first book, Goodwood, but still an engrossing read. Both are stand-alone mysteries, though the town of Goodwood does have a one-line cameo in Cedar Valley. The writing is still lyrical, though more straight forward and humorous; the characters are still complicated people; the town still eccentric in what feels to me and my own cultural experience as akin to the Deep South.

A distillation of the book as condensed from the blurb:
On the first day of summer in 1993, two strangers arrive in the town of Cedar Valley.

One is a calm looking man in a brown suit. He makes his way directly to Cedar Valley Curios & Old Wares, sitting down on the footpath, where he leans silently against the big glass window for hours.

The other is 21-year-old Benny Miller. Benny has come to Cedar Valley in search of information about her mother, Vivian, who has recently died.

What unfolds is a complicated plot surrounding the parallel mysteries of the man in the brown suit, and Vivian Moon, the woman who left Benny and her father when she was an infant. As Benny pieces together fragments of Vivian's life, trying to figure out who her mother was, the police struggle to figure out the identity of the man in the brown suit.

Throsby ties this story directly to the real-life mystery of The Somerton Man, or The Tamam Shud Case, an unsolved case from the late 1940's that remains open, and in Cedar Valley, a mystery that tantalised Vivian with its romance. As a plot device, it works really well, but also dooms the story, to a certain extent, to a mystery with no satisfying solution.

If Goodwood and Cedar Valley are any indication, Throsby isn't interested in offering her readers a tidy solution at the end; some questions are answered, some are not. Quite a bit of the mystery remains, although she offers readers, and Benny, just enough to piece together a framework of possibility - of probability - but no certainty. We're left with an impression of Vivian's life; that she was memorable to all who knew her, but for all her seeking, she was both misguided and tragic. The man in the brown suit ... well, I'll just leave off by saying he was shades of Walter G. Middy.

The story is told in 3rd person omniscient by an unnamed narrator. It works very well, but as I said, the story wasn't as good as her first, and there were characters and scenes that were introduced that never went anywhere. The Detective, Simmons, was, if I may be so bold as to say, a complete failure as a character; I'm not sure what Throsby was trying to accomplish, but I don't think it was the dumb asshat with brief moments of insight that she ended up with. Benny, too, was not the best formed character, although I can see that that might have been intentional. The rest of the cast though, were brilliantly formed, complex characters that really came alive on the page.

Overall, a genuinely enjoyable read. Throsby is talented at writing beautifully lyrical and complex mysteries and I look forward to whatever she comes up with next. ( )

Cedar Valley, Holly Throsby’s second novel, is a contemporary mystery firmly rooted in a small town Australian setting.

On the first day of December 1993, a man in a brown suit seats himself on the pavement in front of Cedar Valley Curios & Old Wares. When store owner Cora Franks eventually finds time to confront him, she is shocked to discover he has died. Amongst the crowd that gathers to witness the spectacle of a dead man, stands Benny Miller. Having only arrived in Cedar Valley that morning, Benny is both fascinated and disturbed by the incident, but she is too distracted by her need to learn more about her recently deceased mother, Vivian Moon, to give the dead stranger much more than a passing thought.

While Benny is settling in to the town, developing a relationship with Odette, her mother’s one time best friend, in the hopes of understanding why Vivian abandoned her as an infant, the police begin to investigate how a dead man came to be sitting on a footpath in Cedar Valley. Wearing a vintage brown suit, and shiny black shoes, the man has no identification and the coroner can’t determine a cause of death.

Some readers will recognise the parallels between the enigma of the dead man in Cedar Valley, and that of ‘The Somerton Man’, the subject of one of Australia’s most enduring mystery’s. The local police are baffled by the strange similarities between the two cases and struggle to make sense of it.

Various residents of Cedar Valley play a role in the story, from the local chemist, to the towns ‘womaniser’, and Detective Sergeant Simmons ailing mother, Elsie, who many not remember what she was told yesterday, but can recall events from decades before. I enjoyed the setting, the people, the town and its environs are easy to visualise.

Though the pace is a little slow and meandering for my taste, Throsby moves the story forward and eventually reveals a surprising connection between Benny, the mystery man, and the town of Cedar Valley. The conclusion is a little vague, but fits the theme of unanswerable questions that runs through the novel.

A warm, engaging read, I liked Cedar Valley, it’s the sort of novel to fill a lazy afternoon picnicking in the country ( )

Small town Australia - interesting characters and a mystery. I enjoyed tis book better than Goodwood but I still needed some loose ends explained to me when it abruptly finished. A nice easy book to read on the train. ( )