See How Small by Scott Blackwood. Fourth Estate, $24.99.

Matter-of-factly related, the horrors begin on the first page of Scott Blackwood's novel, See How Small. "Take off your clothes, the men with guns said"; "They smiled with their guns"; "the men with guns did things to us". The recollections are those of three teenage girls who were about to close the ice cream parlour where they worked in a city in Texas. They were raped, shot and their bodies incinerated as the building was burned down. Blackwood's point of departure is a sequence of real events that happened in Austin in 1991 and remain the subject of a cold case investigation more than 20 years afterwards. Believing that the girls still haunt the place and some of its people, Blackwood has invented a web of terrible consequences from all that the murders began. This is a short novel, its telling unhurried, yet much of darkness, desire and remorse is compressed within its compass.

Steadily Blackwood introduces the cast. Kate Ulrich, who owned the ice cream parlour, has lost her daughters, Zadie and Elizabeth. together with their "horsey" friend Meredith. Her second, and soon to be another ex-husband, Ray, was meant to lock up, but took the chance of dalliance instead. "Our firefighter", Jack Dewey, still has devastating dreams as the fifth anniversary approaches. He "sees, and even speaks to the girls". Two adults committed the murders. Their driver, 17-year-old Michael Greer, has seen his elder brother shot and turns to drugs. The case is not over for Chronicle reporter Rosa Heller who pursues every fugitive lead. In this, perhaps, she seeks a kind of redemption from the example of her father, who is "high-principled but cruel. A gifted journalist who abused his talent. A secret racist who helped black people because he could feel better about bitter feelings he harboured towards them."

That handful of sentences shows Blackwood's masterly economy. Here is the core of another novel that might have been written, whose theme of bad faith would have resonated with the tale that he chooses to narrate. Recent outstanding American works of fiction have been written about the Iraq War, and its presence is felt here in the figure of the damaged veteran, Hollis Finger, who lives in his car and who has observed "the hideous man", as he calls him, before the fire. Later, the homeless men Truck and Trailer will unwittingly lead that man to Hollis. Each cameo appearance in the novel is carefully crafted so as to illuminate the wider action. Thus Gloria, the demented 86-year-old former B-grade Hollywood performer asks Michael what it is to be a woman, and then answers her own question: "It means to be filled up inside yourself but always to feel empty". Unaware, she is speaking for the bereaved mother Kate, as well as for herself.

See How Small packs in much complex detail: relationships break down, affairs begin, one of the main characters wills his own death and, in a shocking surprise, there is another death by fire. All the while the lost girls hover at the edge of the frame, troubling memories, glimpsed by Hollis in the trees of a park. Blackwood imagines their voices, as though they could yet be heard by those from whom they have been taken: "See, we say. See how small a thing it is that keeps us apart?" Yet although anniversaries are observed and hopes of revenge and of solving the crime alike are harboured, the girls' absence is final and desolating. Blackwood depicts an American world of opportunists and predators, of people damaged by drugs, carelessness and self-loathing. This is a novel of accomplishment that is no less serious and troubling for its lack of rhetorical flourish.

Peter Pierce is a Canberra reviewer.