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I loved this book from when one of the wheeler dealer characters arrives back from London and as he makes his way towards the Beehive muses how he is now “Smack in the centre of power”.  This New Zealand is the one emerging from the Panama Papers, the one where politics, big business and the media are in cahoots, and one where something is definitely rotten.  This particular rotten conspiracy – Whitehall, Wellington, Paris, Brussels, Baghdad – involves contra contra deals involving oil, money, meat quotas and war crimes.  It is wonderfully complex and even more wonderful is that what gets our main protagonists – ex security advisor Sam and ace reporter Lynette – onto the case is the mysterious death of an aspiring writer working after hours in the Auckland University Library.  His unpublished manuscript is at the heart of the mystery – his fictionalised version of events too inflammatory to be allowed to get into circulation.  Against the power of the written word – the manuscript, Lynette being a journalist and Sam’s reading of Hamlet giving themes to the chapters – is pitted the great repeated phrase: “We all work for the government.”  The pace is lively – lively enough to get you over some pretty unlikely scenarios – and the characters refreshing.  We read about the looks and style of the men as well as the women, and the main two instigators are flawed and interesting.  We get enough tantalising bits of Sam’s back-story to want to read more about him, and get to respect Lynette enough to want her to get working on another story.  And as Something is Rotten is the first in the Matakana series by popular novelist Linda Olsson and scriptwriter Thomas Sainsbury, we’re good on both counts.

Nordic noir with a kiwi twang!  The Mistake is a great jigsaw puzzle of a murder mystery.  A terrible car crash on a snow-covered lava field; nine years later in Reykjavík a man blacks out and when he comes to, discovers he is near a woman’s mutilated body – what is the connection?  And the slam dunk of a case, where the man with a dodgy story has been found right next to the victim, turns murky for Detective Grímur Karlsson when a vengeful father, a controlling psychiatrist and two illegal immigrant working girls are thrown into the mix.  The Mistake is novella length – it can be read in one sitting – and suffers for it.  It would have made a great full length novel where we could have really got to know Grant’s characters, saving them from the “all women are victims, prostitutes or evil; all men are well meaning, just following orders or psychologically damaged” array.  The resolution of the mystery is told rather than revealed, and the creepy ending – where we question who are the victims and who the psychopaths – although well done, doesn’t have the impact it might have had in a fuller novel.  Still well worth a read.

A mash-up of sci-fi and noir, Made to Kill is set in a stereotypical US where the Hollywood star system rules, Kennedy is in office, the enemy is ‘the Reds’, guy wear tight white t-shirts and gals hang out in ice cream parlours with soda fountains, and PIs wait in their small offices waiting for the beginning of a plot to walk through the door.  And the mash-up? Christopher’s PI Ray Electromatic is a robot – the last robot after all his kind were disassembled after the populace got too creeped out by their too-human likeness, especially those of the populace whose jobs were taken by the new form of labour.  Ray has got his PI creds and his office manager is a computer called Ada – who communicates verbally with Ray whilst images of her swirl like cigarette smoke in his circuits.  Ada is essential – although Ray has the emotional memories of his creator, the late Professor Thornton, he only has the capacity for remembering 24 hours of activity before his memory tape fills up and must be replaced.  Ray’s memory of cases depends on Ada filling him in – and now that Ada has moved Ray into the hit-man business due to her profit drive, he also depends on Ada to tell him who he has killed.  All good – and gets better when the expected siren walks into the office with a triple whammy of the request for a PI job to look for a lost person along with a hitman request to kill him when found, topped off with a bag full of gold bullion.  And the plot unfolds in a nice noir-ish way, if not a bit too heavy handed on the simile front.  We are taken at whirlwind pace into an unfolding Soviet conspiracy to infiltrate the US – using the US’ own most powerful agency – Hollywood.  And time is ticking through to the denouement involving a movie premier at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and the iconic Hollywood sign.  All good fun apart from the fact that the parody style doesn’t allow for either the true grit of noir nor the scientific rigour of good sci-fi – the latter elements of the plot, apart from Ray himself, are ludicrous and push the book into farce.  Made to Kill is a great idea and is the first in a trilogy to feature Ray Electromatic, maybe the next two will be more the homage to Raymond Chandler Christopher intends for his series.

Philippa Barnes, glacier guide and amateur sleuth is back – but global warming means glacier guiding is no longer a promising career, so she is maintaining tourist tracks for DOC in Paparoa National Park.  She isn’t too worried about the political unrest she finds when she arrives in Punakaiki – a new DOC manager is planning a major tourism venture in the region, much to the horror of the locals – she is just there to make some money before heading back to Franz and starting a low key tourist venture of her own.  But when the new manager is found dead, and the Police announce it is murder, Philippa ends up once again drawn into the mystery.  And there are suspects galore – and a body count rising to rival an episode of Midsomer Murders.  The backdrop of the Punakaiki pancake rocks and blowholes and the Park’s limestone cave systems is perfect for the creation and stashing of corpses, and the wild West Coast’s reputation as a haven for people escaping all sorts of situations adds to the rich mix.  The wild and mysterious environment is a nice metaphor for the personal secrets and tragedies Philippa uncovers while trying to connect the dots that link the murders.  And she is a nicely flawed character – having personal history to deal with – and sometimes being quite indiscreet with the gossip/information she is given.  Cold hard murder is a good murder mystery – there are enough clues for the reader to keep coming up with possible solutions, but I am not convinced that there are quite enough for the reader to guess the correct one.  A gripping read – and one that made me want to re-visit the spectacular Paparoa region.

“What had changed so abruptly to discard logic and calculation?”, Brian Duncan, an ex US undercover cop and now a NZ PI, asks this of himself as he heads off into the bush alone at one point in this fast paced thriller – but many of the characters might ask it many times through the story.  Duncan has been contracted to see if Toni Bourke, who runs the Black Horse Bar and Casino in Rotorua, was complicit in the violent robbery of her own premises.  Duncan expects a quick job and a bit of sightseeing before heading back to Auckland – but is in for a shock.  Not only is Toni’s TAB “a lot closer to Detroit than to Ellerslie”, Toni herself knocks Duncan for six emotionally – and there appears to be lot more going on than the theft of slightly less than $115.000 can account for.  The reader knows exactly what is going on – that the heist is the work of Pio, a hapless kid who inadvertently takes off with a $500,000 bag of methamphetamine as well as the money – all after accidentally shooting a patron in the head.  This unfortunate mess gets two local gangs involved in trying to find the dope and the money, as well as the police and the PI.  The latter secretly engaged by a gambling company bureaucrat in Auckland madly trying to save his job.  The more fearsome of the two Rotorua gangs is headed up by Kingi, Pio’s brother, and his desperate handling of the situation is heightened by his illicit P habit and the increasing criticism of his off-sider and suspicion of his crew.  It is hard to believe this is Berards’ first published novel; it is remarkable how he keeps the reader aware of what is going on while all his characters are flapping around in the dark.  And that amidst the rapid pace of the plot he still allows the reader time to feel for Toni – who deserves a break rather than the black hole she finds herself in, for Duncan – who is fighting demons, for Pio when he is found, and for Henry – an ageing gangbanger whose body is starting to fail him and for whom the public health service is probably only accessible from inside a prison.  The characters are great, the use of nature as a backdrop – both the beauty and the violence, effective, and the message of the evils of methamphetamine clearly stated.  As Kingi says: “This, folks, is the other Aotearoa. The one they don’t put in the travel brochures.”  Highly recommended.