Book review: In this engaging and smartly written thriller, Kiwi author Catherine Lea returns to Detective Inspector Nyree Bradshaw, who fronted the first novel in the series, 2022′s The Water’s Dead. It’s a series the author describes as the local answer to British crime writer Ann Cleeve’s popular Vera Stanhope series.
Fans of Cleeve should take note: Lea gives Bradshaw a similar dry sense of humour to Stanhope’s, and also makes much of the local setting, which in Lea’s case is a down-at-heel Far North, rife with gangs, meth addiction and generational poverty, notwithstanding a few high rollers busy working their own agendas.
If The Water’s Dead was a novel that took a while to grab the reader, its sequel gets off to a more compelling start and never looks back. Within the first few chapters we learn of a garrotting of a local woman, a hoarder who was not liked by the community, and Bradshaw finds out that her adult son – in prison for murder – fathered a child when he was 16. The girl’s mother has died and he wants Bradshaw to step in and take care of her.
Soon, the discovery of another body in the hoarder’s ramshackle house deepens the mystery, and as the investigation progresses, ties to a drug syndicate, a dodgy lawyer and a group of abused and damaged ex-foster children emerge.
Throughout the investigation, Bradshaw and her team have to deal with the close-knit – and often tight-lipped – community. As one character puts it, “They say there are six degrees of separation between everyone in the world. In New Zealand it’s more like two. In the Far North it’s even closer.”
While Bradshaw is the focus, Lea advances the investigation by following members of her team as they hunt down leads, lending the narrative breadth and immediacy and taking some of the responsibility away from her. We also get to learn more about Bradshaw’s somewhat lonely personal life, the ongoing stress of the job – her home is undergoing extensive renovations after being vandalised in a previous case – and the fractured and troubled relationship with her son. “She’d lost her own child. Or, at least she’d been so absorbed in her work she’d barely noticed him drift away. That was the beginning of the end. Her marriage and her relationship with her son both silently dissolving without her even noticing.”
Lea is good at depicting the pressures of taking on an unexpected grandchild late in life – a plot point that offers a happier parallel to that of the ex-foster children elsewhere in the novel.
Lea writes that this novel was written much faster than its predecessor. “This one burst out of the gates with a bang, tripped, stumbled, picked itself up, and headed for the finish line within months.”
That burst of inspiration, the always evolving plot and the nuanced portrayal of the Far North (Lea emphasises its physical beauty and sense of community as well as its myriad social problems) make this a very satisfying read. Lea and Bradshaw are on a roll.
Better Left Dead, by Catherine Lea (Bateman, $37), is out now.
