Reckless is a true crime/memoir by bestselling Australian author, Marele Day. At the end of 2012, Marele Day gets the sad news of the sudden death of her good friend, Jean Kay. While he was infamous as a hijacker, an embezzler, an opportunist, shapeshifter and a soldier of fortune, to her he was initially the skipper of the yacht on which she hitched a ride to Singapore, a fellow adventurer; but soon enough, a friend, a brother.

She is thrown into reminiscing: when they first met, when she was still distraught with grief over the loss of her life partner and needing to hit life hard; their voyage with its precarious ending, to Singapore; and their reunion in France thirty years later.

“The girl who hitched a ride on Jean’s boat, who was willing to try everything, to see how close to the edge she could go, had discovered that edges are sharp, can cause damage. It took me years to make my way towards the small quiet oscillations at the centre.”

Jean had proposed that she write his version of the crime that had him on the run from the law when they first met: a daring heist, the embezzling of eight million francs from the obscenely wealthy and influential French aeronautics manufacturer, Marcel Dassault, to teach him a lesson, to bring him down a notch or two. He teamed up with Dassault’s accountant: “the numbers man in the suit and the barefoot soldier of fortune.”

After Jean sent her a kilo and a half of press clippings about the case, it was a project that took her back to Paris and then to Brazil to research the detail that would enrich the tale and lend it authenticity.

“In a novel everything has to be plausible but this isn’t a novel. Real life is full of contradictions, the unexplainable, and, I am finding, the bizarre and incredible… The more I wade into this case, the murkier the water seems to become. So often what I take to be a solid fact dissolves like a mirage. Despite the lack of detail, the story was much more straightforward when all I had was what Jean had told me. But is it true?”

Day reveals her fascination with language, and demonstrates her talent with words: “I love French, love dressing up in its chic elegance, well-tailored phrases. Crisp seams and haute couture, but what my mind wants at the moment is to lounge around in the pyjamas of my native language” and “This is how I began writing, by making verbal photographs, images in words. Writing was a way of drawing what I saw.”

She leaves the reader wondering about this charismatic charmer: “A fox makes sorties into the cultivated meadow, will even come up to the house, but it can never be properly domesticated; its spirit belongs to the wild. You never know when that wildness is going to manifest or what might provoke it. It makes the connection precious when the fox sits down at the table with you, when he takes you into his family, considers you a friend, not prey.” A captivating tale.