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The title of this novel refers to a true incident in 1981 when one of our top SIS spooks lost his briefcase; when it was discovered by a journalist it had been left in the Aro Valley and found to contain his business cards, a diary of scurrilous gossip, three mince pies, two fruit pies, the NZ Listener, and a Penthouse magazine.  The novel isn’t about this embarrassing incident, it is however about the inanity of government agencies, especially those tasked with impossible jobs – like for example keeping all New Zealanders safe from an ill- defined threat.  If you have ever worked in a government department, especially a risk-averse one, you will sympathise with Rachel McManus.  Rachel has just started working for the New Zealand Alarm and Response Ministry.  She has previously been a civil servant so isn’t totally unprepared for the experience – but this is a time of global panic in the face of the unfortunately termed ‘Islamic Threat’.  Rachel faces the usual misogyny and racism – but writ large due to the ridiculously heightened stress levels.  She suffers the lecherous co-workers, the embarrassing after-work drinks, the insane meetings where no one wants to admit they don’t know or don’t understand, the slavish subservience to hierarchy – but all dialled up to 11.5.  Rachel is tasked – sort of – with tracking a terror suspect.  Having the most invasive technologies at her fingertips she plunges in.  The suspect is suspected of inculcating youth with radical ideas picked up overseas, and there is a consequential concern that he might be planning an attack somewhere in Wellington.  The novel becomes farcical when the evidence and the suspicions grow further and further apart; and there is a crazy sequence where Rachel decides to do some old fashioned on-foot surveillance to try and clarify matters.  She has no surveillance skills whatsoever.  In fact, she has no skills full stop given her parlous training – but possibly because of this rather than despite it, she is the only one in the Ministry who has any common sense.  But due to her being young and a woman, she might as well be yelling into a Wellington gale when attempting to inform her colleagues and bosses of her views.  Given the novel’s inexorable style it has no real shape – but makes its point very compellingly regarding racial profiling and bureaucracy gone mad.  And there are enough real world incidents thrown in (not out of place at all amongst the absurdity) to keep the novel worryingly grounded.  So, given there are still questions to be answered around how a country should position itself in a world at threat from terror attacks, A Briefcase, Two Pies and a Penthouse is at once funny, tragic and disturbing.

What a great book!  The direction of our fear looks at the many many small decisions we make every day that result in benefit or harm, to ourselves or to others.  Sometimes small harms and slights sometimes catastrophic.  It deals with the networks we are a part of; those we know of and those we don’t – and the many alternative universes that shimmer before they collapse down to the one that we experience.  It is a tense and absorbing story of four people. Three – Brendan an Irish widower, Sally a young school girl and Tamás a Hungarian immigrant – are all connected by their travelling on the morning commuter train to Wellington each day.  The fourth protagonist is Farida a young Muslim woman working as a translator for the security services in Dunedin.  We follow all of them and learn of their dreams, their regrets and their opportunities; they are all dealing with possible changes to their lives – Brendan thinking of starting a new relationship, Sally crossing into adulthood, Tamás trying to make a place in New Zealand for himself and his Hungary-based family, and Farida trying to make sense of her own world and that which she glimpses via her security work, and struggling with what to do when she thinks the two might be overlapping.  And we read of all of this within the frame of terrorist threats.  A sense of pending tragedy looms as you read of Brendan, Sally, Tamás and Farida – ordinary people whose lives may or may not soon be engulfed in disaster.  Highly recommended.

Natasha Johnson, a 15-year-old schoolgirl – seemingly a paragon to her peers and elders – is found murdered at her school camp at Piha Beach.  Newly promoted Detective Sergeant Nick Knight lands the job of managing the suspects side of the case, and he and his team have to sift through a number of likely suspects and persons of interest.  Wyatt himself was a detective and wrote The student body while convalescing from an illness.  He hasn’t quite got the knack of incorporating his detailed knowledge into the narrative – and at times the novel reads like a text book on police procedure.  The writing, while at times quite thrilling, is very patchy: I found some of the similes clumsy: “The savagery of these attacks … still hung around the area like prostitutes around K Road in the early hours”; “Cunningham’s reaction was to storm out of the room as quick as a Nazi soldier invading Poland”.  I also found the sex scenes out of place and gratuitous and wished that Wyatt agreed with José Saramago who once wrote “I don’t think it is worth explaining how a character’s nose or chin looks”, as Wyatt’s detailed descriptions of all of his many characters gets in the way of the narrative flow.  And the plotting is good and deserves a good flow.  There are parallel themes of domestic and student bullying, and a number of likely suspects for the initial horrific crime and others that ensue.  I didn’t find the resolution totally satisfying, as the story was so driven by Knight we got the facts of what happened but no depth of motive – and an apparent lightness of attitude to statutory rape.  With Wyatt’s background, it is understandable that the book is written from a police perspective – but along with this comes a slightly unhealthy view of the rest of society, and a dodgy view of women, which for me led to a loss of sympathy for Detective Sergeant Nick Knight.  I suppose some of this might result from Knight’s tragic background that is alluded to, and we find out he has a strained relationship with his criminal lawyer father – so maybe future installments will redeem him, after all he does love his dogs, even if they do get left home alone a lot.  And if there are future titles I think it would be interesting to see more of the criminal lawyer father – perhaps a way of giving the reader a bit more moral complexity.

Marshall Grade has been laying low in witness protection after quite spectacularly not doing so in American Blood, the previous novel in the Marshall Grade series. But when he finds out U.S. Marshal Lucas Cohen, his witness protection contact, was kidnapped by someone trying to find him, he decides he’s going to be the one doing the finding.  And as we are now coming to expect the ensuing story is revealed by a swirl of characters.  And as with American Blood the ethics of the situation gets wonderfully blurry.  The ‘baddies’ have complex lives and often do bad things for good reasons, and the ‘goodies’? – well they are few and far between, Cohen is the closest thing to a good guy but the good deeds are few, and the one truly good Samaritan turn in this story is taken by one of the scariest of the criminal groups.  Marshall’s Law tells us more about Marshall’s difficult past; possibly the roots of his ongoing OCD tendencies – trying to keep order in a messy world.  And we meet a hapless ex-con with a dangerous brother and a feisty wife, a drug dealer who colours everything in his life the white of his product, a man with a yappy dog who has got into serious debt, and a crook who feels bad at using his sick mother’s Honda for illegal purposes so punishes himself by leaving the radio on her gospel channel as penance: “Yeah, I’ve done some bad shit, but at least I left the radio on your station.”  We also have characters from American Blood: Cohen the U.S. Marshal and of course somewhere is the Asaro family – the target of Marshall’s blown undercover job that landed him in WITSEC.  The plot is complex and clever and unwinds slowly through to the explosive ending.  And what is wonderful about Marshall’s Law is that it is an action-packed thriller that you want to read like a piece of literary fiction; savouring the writing as you go.  The scenes are described in exquisite detail and the noir-ish tone hits just right. I wanted to know how all the characters and threads of the story fitted together, but at the same time didn’t want the book to end.  Roll on the next installment!