“Whatever was in that bag — It was worth killing for.”

Paul Cleave’s Somebody Always Comes Looking proved to be the perfect choice for the first thriller I have read in quite a while. It has all the best thriller elements: moral ambiguity, people’s lives flipping in an instant through greed or need, a relentlessly twisty plot, and of course plenty of nail-biting thrills. Not far into the novel, three people find themselves at a Malaysian beach resort — two having amended their plans to be there, one with malicious intent. All three have their lives suddenly veer off into unexpected, and tragic, trajectories. Two of the three are New Zealanders: Luca Carpenter is a wannabe writer whose chosen career has wrecked his relationship of four years; Katie Sanderson is going through a messy divorce, boring herself and those around her with self-pity.

Both Kiwis find themselves capable of acts previously unconscionable, not only that — capable of dubious self-justification: “Yes, she did something wrong, but not bad.” On the side of law and order, sort of, are Omar Khan, an excellent policeman who sums up events and possibilities very quickly, and his partner Fariq Bakar. They are eventually as ensnared in events as the two foreigners, and the centre of the action moves from a jungle fringed beach outside Kuala Lumpur to a remote farmstead outside Christchurch — with manipulating forces working in various other locations, all keen on revenge, or to get their mitts on money.

If “he’s learned one thing, it’s that wherever the money goes, a world of shit follows” — as the thrust of the main protagonists’ actions veer from one extreme to the other, the reader wonders whether the random kindness of strangers (“To help you, and to repent, and if it costs us our lives then that is a price we must pay”) can ever beat the calculated determination of international crime gangs. Cleave gives all the main protagonists back stories that explain their extreme behaviours. As is often the case in his works, one of the main characters is his den-of-iniquity Christchurch — this time holding its own against the horrors of the Malaysian jungle. Both having treacherous terrain, boggy from being drenched in torrential rain at any moment. Both home to terrifying lethal animals — “shiny eyes with no soul behind them”, “The horns come at him … Like a shark fin splitting the surface of the water.”

Luca is a wannabe writer who spends a lot of time seeing his reality through the lens of ideas for his writing, and I couldn’t help but consider the amount of time Cleave must spend on contemplating ever more gorier and peculiar ways of killing people as he walks through his world. What holds the relentless plot twists and macabre turns of events together is the human vulnerability of his protagonists. Somebody Always Comes Looking is compelling, repelling, and a page-turner from start to finish, and it has a great ‘the nightmare not quite over’ ending. Intrigued? Give it a read – Paul Cleave really is a master of #YeahNoir.