A serial killer worms his way into many lives in ‘scalp-tingling’ novel ‘Highway Thirteen’

Halfway through “Highway Thirteen,” her ingenious, scalp-tingling collection of linked stories, Fiona McFarlane serves up “Democracy Sausage,” composed of an eight-page sentence, narrated by Chris Biga, an Australian politician standing for election in 1998.

Just days before, another Biga, named Paul, was arrested for a series of murders committed during the 1990s, along a wooded road south of Sydney. Chris wears a button that proclaims “NO RELATION” as he works a barbecue grill outside a polling site. He frets that he may lose the race because of the coincidence, lamenting the killer’s “right to participate in the process of my name, the democratic process, my blackened name.”

The charred lives of those affected by Biga’s spree form the crux of “Highway Thirteen” as McFarlane moves stealthily between timelines — the last story, “Lucy,” opens in 1950 while “Podcast” unfolds in 2028 — tracing the impact of his crimes across decades and continents.

The author slices and dices chronology with the nimble hands of an Iron Chef. Each protagonist connects to Paul Biga: his next-door neighbor and former teacher; a British ex-pat in Texas, whose sister vanished years earlier while hiking Down Under; a retired cop who’d cracked the case; a charismatic flight attendant who persuaded her sibling to call off a wedding. They’re separated by time and space, but they all know, or know of, Biga.

The pages turn themselves. McFarlane’s technique is flawless: She drizzles a light irony amid the book’s fine-grained surfaces, reminiscent of Tessa Hadley’s fiction, focusing raptly on her characters and how they’re upended by a lanky young man who preys on hitchhikers and tourists, luring victims into a white truck.

A pair of Swiss backpackers mentioned in one tale take center stage in “Hostel.” The muscular, Alice Munro-esque “Demolition” peels away an elderly woman’s secrets as the house next door is razed. Jill, the flight attendant in “Hostess,” is the epitome of glamour, “a goddess operating on a different timescale from everyone around her. She walked with a kind of serene shimmy.”

Costumes are a motif here. McFarlane asks whether we’re wired to hide behind masks and disguises for sudden escapes: A Hollywood actor returns to his native Oz to portray Biga, donning a fat suit to depict the criminal’s final weeks in prison, a touch of fantasy that mirrors a personal crisis.

An American Halloween nearly derails when a pint-sized witch goes missing. An English teenager on a trip to the Eternal City slips out in the middle of the night and finds a courage that will one day save her life: “Rome … was all immense and radiant … vast gardens, rats, lovers, sleeping priests, satellite televisions, water rushing through subterranean passages … she felt a dazzling strength, a powerful upsurge of possibility.”

McFarlane’s a startlingly gifted stylist and she makes the correct call, keeping Biga shadowy: Throughout the collection, he’s a mere taxi driver who keeps cockatoos in an aviary, keeps his violence under wraps. “Highway Thirteen” is a Cubist collage of grief and suspense, grand betrayals and cryptic desires. It entertains even as it plunges headfirst into unspeakable evil.

Hamilton Cain, who also reviews for the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post, lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Highway Thirteen

By: Fiona McFarlane.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 258 pages, $27.