New Zealand crime writing is notable for incorporating NZ’s unique cultural landscape, including Maori culture and history, writes book reviewer ANNA CREER. 

Michael Bennett, an award-winning screenwriter and director, as well as an award-winning crime writer, is Maori, of Te Arawa descent. 

His latest novel, Carved in Blood (Simon and Schuster), is the third novel in his series featuring Maori detective Hana Westerman. 

Hana has left Auckland and the police force and moved to Tata Bay to work with the local Maori community. It’s winter and everyone is waiting for the rising of the Matariki, a sacred constellation in Maori culture. 

One of the Elders describes the stars as “the prow of a waka, A canoe… to carry us to our real home. All year long the navigator of the canoe collects the souls of those who have passed in a net. Then the waka disappears and when it emerges again, the souls are released. And they become new stars”. 

Hana’s daughter Addison announces that she is getting engaged and would like to have the engagement party the night the Matariki rises. When Hana’s ex-husband Detective Inspector Jaye Hamilton goes to buy champagne for the party, he interrupts a violent robbery and is shot. 

With Jaye critically injured in ICU, Hana immediately contacts Elisa Williams, the detective inspector in charge of the investigation, and volunteers to be part of the team on the case. Hana respects Williams, who is of first generation Samoan descent and sees her as “the kind of cop that can make true systemic change. Brown, young, smart. Brave as hell”. 

The investigation initially leads to a suspect who works as a courier for a Chinese organised crime syndicate. But Hana eventually wonders if Jaye was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or was he the target of the gunman? 

In Carved in Blood, Bennett blends a meticulously plotted police procedural in a poignant story of tragedy and hope for the future. 

ALTHOUGH he lives in Melbourne, Geoff Parkes was born and raised in NZ, which is the setting for his debut novel, The Deep Dark Bush will Swallow you Whole (Penguin). 

Parkes is a sports writer and his weekly column The Wrap has become a regular Monday morning must for rugby followers around the world.

In an interview, he revealed: ‘I’d always fancied the idea of writing a novel which provided a strong sense of the rural New Zealand I grew up in. Next came the idea of centering it around a shearing gang: this was something I’d had personal experience with, plus it provided a bunch of diverse characters to play with”. 

In 1983, Emilia Sovernen arrives in Nashville, a small fictional town in King Country in NZ’s North Island. She has travelled from Finland to find out what has happened to her sister Sanna, who disappeared 18 months earlier while working for a shearing gang on a farm outside the town. 

Tom Harten, the detective inspector in charge of the original investigation tells Emilia that despite bringing in “detectives from outside. No assumptions were made about potential suspects. We stripped everything right back… until we find some hard evidence, something that links her to a person of interest or a location, then I’m sorry to say, she is still a missing person”. 

Over the past 12 years, four other girls have disappeared in the area. The police have a theory that there is a serial killer in the area but Emilia believes that with Sanna, it’s a local from Nashville who knows what has happened to her. She tells Harten: “Your countryside, your native bush, it is perfect for swallowing secrets.” 

Emilia knows it was one of Sanna’s workmates in the shearing shed, Ryan, who reported her missing. She asks him to help her discover the truth. 

However, Ryan has problems of his own. His mother has died and he needs to sell her house. The shearing gang had been his vacation job as he’s studying law at Otago University and many in the small town, especially his mates from school, believe he’s pretending to fit in before becoming a city lawyer. 

Parkes divides his narrative between Emilia’s attempts to investigate and 14 months earlier in the summer of 1981 when Sanna joined the shearing gang and became Ryan’s secret lover. 

The end result is an atmospheric, complex story of love, jealousy and revenge. It is an impressive debut.