Blackwell’s experience
in the New Zealand police force is front and centre in this engrossing novel
set mostly in the north of Auckland, the country’s most populous city. Orewa
police station sounds like it should be a one-man operation, but the spread
north of the city means the contingent of police and detectives there, which
includes our main character, Matt Buchanan, has to take on a huge range of
cases.
The discovery of a
skeleton, with some parts missing, inside a bag among the mangroves starts the
story with a double-edged mystery. Not only can the police not identify her,
they also don’t know how she got there or why. Buchanan’s still obsessed with a
missing girl case from 20 years ago that he could never solve, and he still
meets regularly with her parents. He also, as a new constable, arrived at the
scene of a police shooting in 1995 just in time to hold his best mate as she
died. Consequently, he’s carrying a lot of baggage over a lot of years and
refusing to acknowledge it or seek help.
Instead he holds the trauma
damage at bay by sinking himself into his current cases, of which the mystery
girl is one. Blackwell is very skillful at building threads and gradually tying
them together without making it obvious. He also depicts Buchanan’s gradual
descent into, at best, poor judgement and, at worst, the blackest kind of PTSD
where denial is a salve butt ultimately dangerous. It’s done in a way that
makes us believe he might pull through, that if this one case is solved, he’ll
come out the other side unscathed.
If you read a lot of
dark crime fiction, the revelations towards the end might not seem so dark, yet
in once-innocent New Zealand, they are horrifying and all too real. Blackwell’s
references to earlier (real) cases sent me Googling out of interest. My one tiny
quibble with the novel is his street-by-street descriptions of journeys by car.
I’ve lived in Auckland so could follow them (although they did get a tiny bit
tedious) – I wondered what a reader from outside the city would think. But
apart from that, the police procedural detail was interesting and not
overpowering. Blackwell is a pseudonym as a lot of his police work was in
covert operations.
Looking forward to the
next book from this writer!
