Review of The Last Time We Spoke by Fiona Sussman (2016, Allen & Busby)

It was meant to be an evening celebrating her wedding anniversary to her husband, Kevin, attended by her grown son, Jack. Instead, Carla Reid comes round the following morning having been raped and beaten to find her husband in a coma and her son dead. The two young gang members who committed the crime are caught shortly afterwards and sent to prison. As Ben Toroa begins life behind bars, Carla is left to come to terms with losing her son and farm, and caring for her brain-damaged husband. She needs answers from Ben, but he’s reluctant to engage, wary of motives, and focused on surviving inside prison. As the years pass, their lives remain entwined, neither able to move much past the outcome of that fateful night.

Set in New Zealand, Fiona Sussman’s The Last Time We Spoke explores the aftermath of a crime on both the victim and perpetrator. Former teacher, Carla Reid, has been beaten and raped, her husband left a shadow of his former self, and her son murdered. She has to sell their farm to pay for her husband’s care. Ben Toroa, one of the two perpetrators, is a Mauri teenager from a broken home, his mother a mess and her boyfriend a violent thug; his membership of a street gang providing friendship and an outlet for his frustrations. He’s sent to maximum security prison where he struggles to survive unscathed. Sussman plots the years following that night and the tentative relationship between Carla and Ben as each struggles to come to terms with life’s hardships and transform themselves in the aftermath of grief and regret. There’s also a kind of postcolonial line running throughout that tries to set Ben’s Mauri heritage in the context of colonialism that gave the story a bit of a literary twist. The plotting and character development is nicely executed, though the narrative felt a little bit shallow at times, describing events rather than diving deep into thoughts and emotions, and the second criminal disappears entirely from view. And the end just sort of petered out. Nonetheless, it’s an engaging and thoughtful read.

Review of Overkill by Vanda Symon (2007, Orenda Books)

A young mother is forced into an assisted suicide in the small New Zealand town of Matuara. Sam Shephard, the sole-charge police constable in the town, is called to the home. She has mixed feelings about the woman’s disappearance given that she used to be in a relationship with her husband before he ended it. When the woman's body is found in the river the signs are that it was suicide, although Sam has her doubts. A short while later her suspicions have been confirmed and a murder team are bought in to investigate. Sam’s excitement at being part of the team is short-lived when her status moves from police officer to suspect and she’s suspended from duty. Unhappy with her bosses and unwilling to stand-down she continues to investigate, placing her relationship with her senior officers under strain and putting herself in danger.

Overkill is the first in the Sam Shephard police procedural series set in New Zealand. Originally published in 2007 in NZ, it was difficult to get hold of but now has an outlet globally through Orenda Books. The story is set in the small rural town of Matuara, where Sam is a young sole-charge police constable. When a young mother is found dead, it at first appears to be suicide, but then evidence emerges that it could have been murder. It’s Sam’s first murder case, but there’s an added complication: the mother just happens to be the wife of a man Sam dated for a couple of years. That’s not going to stop Sam getting the woman justice, however. Small in stature, Sam is feisty in personality, and when she is deemed a suspect by a visiting murder team and is suspended she vows to solve the case regardless. Despite warnings from her bosses she keeps poking around and to annoy them further she makes better headway than them, though it is also making her a target. The tale is a pretty standard rural police procedural with a head-strong lead character who doesn’t mind bending rules to get results but has her vulnerabilities. Symon does a nice job spins the story out, providing a couple of viable lines of enquiry and suspects, and Sam is an interesting enough character with whom to spend some time. The conspiracy at the heart of the story was viable, but the wall of silence around it felt a little unrealistic. Overall, an enjoyable procedural tale.

Review of Cemetery Lake by Paul Cleave (2008, Arrow)

Theodore Tate used to be a police detective, but after the death of his daughter and injuring of his wife at the hands of drunk driver, he left the force. At the same time, the perpetrator of his family tragedy disappeared. Two years later he is working as a private investigator. His latest case has him visiting a cemetery for the exhumation of a suspected murder victim. As the coffin is unearthed, three bodies rise in the bordering lake. In the coffin is a young woman rather than a middle-aged bank manager. Rather than simply let his former colleagues investigate, Tate decides to steal evidence and run his own inquiry. His hunch is that there are other women occupying other peoples' final resting places and others might be destined to join them. Defying just about everybody connected to the case, and making a series of poor choices, Tate carries on regardless convinced that he can catch the killer before anyone else can.

Cemetery Lake is a serial killer/private investigator tale set in Christchurch in New Zealand. As is the common trope for PIs, Tate is down on his luck, a former policeman whose wife was left in a vegetative state and daughter killed by a drunk driver. He stumbles onto the work of a serial killer at an exhumation when the wrong body is in the coffin and people formerly buried are found in a lake. His need for justice sets him off in pursuit even though his former police colleagues want him to stand down. Cleave's tale charts his dogged, destructive track. Told in the first person, the narrative is engaging and compelling, even while the tale itself is somewhat of a stretch to believe. Cleave keeps the pace high, with plenty of action, intrigue, and twists and turns. It barrels along to a climatic denouement, but ends somewhat on a cliff-edge rather than rounding things out. Overall, a break-neck serial killer tale full of the usual tropes and sliding towards outlandish at times, held together by being a page-turner with an interesting enough lead character

Review of Death on Demand by Paul Thomas (Bitter Lemon Press, 2012)

Maori cop Tito Ihaka was exiled to a rural backwater for assaulting a fellow cop and refusing to drop a case he believed was pre-meditated family murder rather than a random hit-and-run. Five years later and he’s asked to return to Auckland by his old boss to talk to Christopher Lilywhite, whose wife had been mowed down by the speeding car. Lilywhite is terminally-ill with cancer and confesses to hiring a hitman to dispose of his wife, though he has no idea as to the identity of the murderer. Ihaka’s original hunch is finally vindicated, but the following day Lilywhite is dead. When his old rivals, Detective Inspector Tony Charlton and his side-kick, are assigned to the case it seems that Ihaka is heading back to the sticks. But when another murder takes place, he’s asked to run that investigation, also taking an interest in the shooting of an undercover cop a few weeks previously. Gradually he starts to realise that there are linkages between the cases, there’s a hitman actively at work, and something is rotten in the Auckland police force.

Death on Demand is the fourth book in the Tito Ihaka series, published fifteen years after the last outing. After a slow, fragmented start in which Thomas introduces a number of characters and past crimes, the story starts to take shape, with plenty going-on in Ihaka’s return to Auckland – murder, blackmail, prostitution, police corruption, and professional robberies. The principle hook, however, is Ihaka. After five years in a rural backwater for assaulting a fellow police officer, the Maori cop has mellowed somewhat but he’s still very much his own man and conducts police business without diplomacy. And he’s still got a nose for sniffing out leads and unearthing evidence, even if some of his practices fall outside the police manual. In this sense, he sometimes tests the reader’s empathy, for example when he beds a witness. The story itself is reasonably convoluted, with a couple main threads with sub-plots and a diverse set of characters. And there is plenty of intrigue and twists and turns that kept me guessing as to the identity of the hitman and corrupt officer in the police. I’d certainly be interested in going back and reading earlier instalments.