alysontheblog

A middle-aged man with a rifle in his car decides to pick up a young woman on the highway.  He is just wanting to help; she is about the same age as his estranged daughter.  The young woman sees accepting the lift as a failure of spirit, she has a blade concealed in one of her rings, she is running from something and wants to be totally self-reliant.  But shortly after being dropped off in the man’s home town she is harassed by local thugs and the man once again comes to her rescue.  The man, Lewis, and the woman, Tess, end up co-habiting, innocently – but when a middle-aged man co-habits with a woman the same age as his own daughter there is inevitable tension, and suspicions from others.  We learn of Tess’ unusual background; that she was abandoned by her drug addicted mother to the care of her loving earth-mother grandmother, that she is now fleeing from a series of violent incidents, which are revealed gradually.  And Lewis is a man in mourning; his wife died in horrific circumstances, he is estranged from his daughter, Jean, his mother is living with advanced dementia in a rest-home, and Jean’s twin brother is in residential care.  We learn that Tess is a drifter because she has a ‘gift’, and whether that really is a gift that helps those she meets, or whether it is a curse that leaves chaos in her wake is the central issue of this book.  The book starts off in a slow and considered way, with a measured revealing of the characters and their histories, but when Jean arrives at her father’s house the novel alters, the pace picks up and we are soon at a fast denouement.  The different story lines are inventive and the characters of Lewis, Jean and Tess are engaging.  But the change of pace left the length of the novel a disappointment for me – it ended up reading like a too long short story rather than a novel – and I really wanted to spend longer finding out more about these intriguing people.  Maybe Tess will wander into someone else’s world and I will get another chance?  Tess is well worth a read.

WELCOME TO THE NGAIO MARSH AWARDS BLOG TOUR 2017

There is an inevitable melange of fiction and reality that arises from piecing together ‘what happened’ in a crime: “a trial is always going to take on the literary form of an unreliable memoir”.

Steve Braunias’ The scene of the crime explores this theme using a number of high profile crime cases – and it has been shortlisted for this year’s Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel: Best Non Fiction. 

Braunias is a columnist and journalist and has written numerous non-fiction books on a wide range of topics.  The cases he writes about in The scene of the crime are mostly New Zealand cases and mostly those that New Zealand readers will remember – Mark Lundy, Antonie Dixon, Clint Rickards.  Braunias’ concerns with the Mark Lundy trial and re-trial thread through the book, and make for compelling and disturbing reading.  I daresay many readers will have opinions on the guilt or otherwise of the accused, and many, like me, will have been swayed when forming those opinions by body language or thoughts of how people ‘should’ behave.  Braunias exposes this as common, shallow and potentially damaging.

Just think of the immediate collapse into certainty a verdict delivers – newsreaders don’t have to say ‘alleged’ any more, those of us who ‘just knew’ feel our intuitions justified, a plethora of alternative versions of events evaporate.  But life is often not that clear cut – and Braunias presents the disturbing possibility that the convictions of some people arise from jurors just accepting the one ‘story’ that most appeals, given their being part of a community that has already adopted a common opinion.

The book is generally quite critical of crime reporting for its role in the forming of this ‘common opinion’, but there is one captivating section devoted to his admiration for the writer of the Police notebook, a column in the Timaru Herald: “Every crime, a sentence; every sentence, a little masterpiece of brevity and accuracy, at once banal and surreal.”  He was so taken with the entries he compiled some into a poem and sent it to Bill Manhire for his consideration!

Braunias’ writing draws mainly from the courtroom – as he sits and witnesses the “sheer ordinariness” of New Zealand criminal court proceedings – but it is also based on his research, and interviews with various parties to the different cases.  It is an impartial telling but also very human: he sympathises, he criticises, he worries.

The book is awash with victims – inside and outside of the court and on both sides of the cases.  Braunias speaks movingly about the families of those accused: “They are surplus to the court’s requirements. They are reduced to bystanders. They have nothing to hold on to, and they float away, like kites, always in sight, but always hovering just out of reach.”  And he also talks of those, like himself, unrelated to the cases but who choose to attend court day after day to watch the system play out. Like Mary who commuted from Auckland to Wellington to attend the Lundy re-trial: “… because she couldn’t bear to miss a second. ‘I just find the whole thing,’ she said, ‘so deeply moving.’”

The scene of the crime is amusing at times but is a serious book, it is a book about how society deals with crime, how it attempts to tidy away the messiness of events into an understandable narrative, so people can feel safe and gain that figment: Closure.  Braunias reminds us that the stories we choose are not just cautionary tales, not works to make a moral point, but stories that conceal real people, people who continue to grieve, to serve their sentences, to walk free … An exceptionally good read.

Martha and Laurie have a totally solid family, with firmly entwined DNA – they each carried the other’s children, all from the same sperm donor.  They love each other and flowing water surrounds them; their property is in the fens, there is a stream running through it, the ocean is a short drive away and two of the children are competitive swimmers.  Martha is taking on more of the household responsibilities because Laurie’s career has taken off, but she is sort of OK with that – except for feeling she might like to have something of her own she doesn’t have to share – like meeting with her birth daughter’s new dance teacher, who wants to practice his life coach skills.  Laurie decides to keep a small secret of her own too, a hidden room she finds in their house.  So the solid family starts to develop minute cracks, not enough to be a problem really – except there are much bigger secrets in Laurie’s past.  Secrets to do with the dry American desert community that obtained her as a child, for a purpose, and to which she returned a few years after being rescued from it as a small girl.  As the book unfolds, the power of the desert starts creeping into the moist security of the family, making larger cracks that are harder to ignore.  And Laurie’s purpose once more starts to play out.  The hidden room begins like the story of a family in the throes of change, as children grow up and parents start thinking of the next stage in their lives.  But it slowly turns into a tale of psychological suspense.  Even in as entwined a family as that of Martha and Laurie’s, the differences play out – the DNA connection between biological mother and child as opposed to the familial relationship between birth mother and child, the woman who feels basically safe and the one who has never really experienced safety.  There are hidden rooms everywhere, in the family home, in the fens, in the desert, and inside the characters.  And horrifically the strongest imperative appears to be the insidious power that men have over women.  The hidden room is a deeply disturbing book, and one that I pondered over long after I had finished reading it.

A Killer Harvest reprises The Hands of Orlac idea that body parts transplanted onto a new host will carry the evil intent of the donors – as donors in historic horror are most likely to come from the criminal classes.  Cleave has wrapped this in the current pseudoscience of cellular memory.  He has also updated the classic source of the harvested organs (criminals) by having some of his central police and medical characters in on a scheme to harvest organs for the greater good, by the summary execution of suspects.  Central to the plot is young Joshua Logan.  Joshua has been blind from birth, he also lost both parents when he was quite young so he was fostered by an aunt and uncle.  His ‘dad’ is a detective and when he is killed on the job Joshua is devastated and sees it as another episode in his cursed life.  But there is a potential miracle in this particular episode, as his father has arranged that in the case of his death a brilliant ophthalmologist will transplant his eyes into Joshua, allowing the boy to see for the first time.  Unfortunately, the father’s death occurred during one of the executions planned by Joshua’s father and his partner Ben Kirk.  Ben carried out the killing and so it is not only Joshua’s dad having his eyes removed the day Joshua gets new eyes, the murderer is too.  Even more unfortunately the executed-without-trial murderer also had a partner, Vincent Archer, and Vincent makes up a list of people he can kill to make Ben very very sorry he killed Vincent’s mate.  In a nice touch Cleave has Vincent leave Ben’s cat off the list, but his ex-partner’s son is way near the top.  So poor cursed Joshua not only has his new eyes to cope with and the bullies at his new school, but he also has a very nasty man trying to kill him.  There is a theme through the novel of Joshua’s favourite books – vampires and zombies – books where creatures unsuccessfully struggle against their true natures.  And A Killer Harvest certainly leans to the view that evil is carried out not by choice but as a result of who you are, or whose parts you may have received under anaesthetic.  It is creepy and extremely well plotted, you may guess some of the twists but I bet you don’t guess them all.  It is compelling reading and yet another great Kiwi thriller from Paul Cleave.

Deception Island won the 2017 KORU Published Romance Book of the Year Award, and deservedly so.  It is a Romance novel; a large part of it deals with two people on a tropical island, they should hate each other but between them sexual tension sizzles, and they frequently have to plunge into the lagoon to cool off, and hide parts of their bodies that are betraying lustful urges.  The two characters are evenly matched and it is all good fun and deliciously played out.  But this book is also a thriller, and a really interesting one.  The woman on the island has been kidnapped by the man.  She (Kelly) has been body doubling for an heiress who is supposed to be sailing solo around the world, keeping the socialite’s fans entranced via a low-resolution web-cam.  She is actually an ex-con with an abusive background and no time at all for men.  The guy (Rafe) kidnaps her for ransom in order to free his son from the clutches of an old boy-soldier comrade (Gabriel), who is threatening to recruit the boy in the same vicious way the two of them were when they fled their war-torn homes.  Rafe is a damaged man who has no time at all for anyone – except for his son.  The story blasts through the expected resolution of the two lost souls on the island to a sequence of events on a second island, where Kelly is given more texture to Rafe’s background and ends up fighting for her life, not knowing if she is in danger from just one of the ex-boy-soldiers or from them both.  When she accuses Gabriel of being an animal he responds: “No, my dear. I am human, and that is far worse.”  The book has themes of child abuse (both in war and in the home), people trafficking, and most of all whether abuse can take away a person’s capacity for love.  It is a high adrenaline read with a feisty female lead and I really enjoyed it.

Amy is a new mum, still coming to terms with having a ‘family’, her husband has moved from a job where he smelt of coffee all the time to one where he stinks of petrol, they have problems with the neighbours, her mother is ailing and her elder sisters judgemental – but all in all things are OK.  Amy is also surrounded by crime, she is a store detective at Cutty’s, a large Wellington department store, she was an animal rights activist in her youth, and from experience knows that most people have infringed at some point in their lives.  And Amy is being interviewed by the Police, and the interview has something to do with an incident during the disturbing last few weeks, the weeks since the announcement of the closure of Cutty’s.  Lifting drifts through these few weeks, and through Amy’s memories as she becomes quite disengaged from her life, observing her child, her husband, herself much as she observes the shoppers in the store.  She wonders about moving away from ‘security’ work, thinking that it puts her in constant proximity to low-level criminals, but then again maybe that’s exactly where she wants to be?  Amy uses her power of ‘discretion’ with the ‘persons of interest’ she spots as she pretends to be a fellow shopper, thinking she has a moral compass, but isn’t she just random with her grace and with her decisions to act?  The closure of the store becomes a metaphor for the disintegration of an era – with its sexist doormen, the sensual face-to-face rather than face-to-screen shopping experience, the tea and cream buns after the first bra fitting, and the various methods of shoplifting; brazen to furtive, but all on an individual, human level – not the horrific violent gang raids on dairies and service stations we see on TV, not the impersonal mass cyber robberies we read about.  “It was tempting to believe that venturing outside the crumbling world of Cutty’s would bring you even closer to the apocalypse and that gangs of wild children carrying improvised weapons wandered the streets … “.  And there is Gerty Cutty, the last surviving member of the founding family, an embodiment of the store’s long and shady past, Amy is intrigued by her and wonders if her sad farewells to the store aren’t also a good riddance, she watches her driven away “A small hand waved at the window as the car pulled away”.  As the staff of Cutty’s work through the final weeks, some getting jobs, some still hoping for a final reprieve, no one really has a handle on the situation – large items go missing, is it theft or part of the wind-down of the store?  And the staff start eyeing up items themselves, to buy or …  And interspersed in the narrative is the Police interview – which crime great or small is being investigated?  Is Amy a suspect or helping with the investigation?  As the store at once winds down and also starts preparing for a final sale – they are flying people down on a special flight from Auckland for it – there is a sense that something has gone very, very wrong.  Lifting is inconclusive and ambiguous, even the title can refer to petty crime or to triumphant moments, it harkens to a time of clarity and certainty that probably never existed on an individual level, not even in youth, and definitely not in any previous era.  It is a lovely read about the passing of time and how every now and again that passage leaves you unmoored for a while.