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Author’s best novel yet

20/12/2022

A Virtuous Lie
by Christina O'Reilly

From the back blurb –
Hidden in the dense bush of the Manawatu, a tiny skeleton lies overgrown with weeds. DSS Archie Baldrick and DC Ben Travers discover that the victim is a young child who went missing from a rural skate park twenty years earlier. Who could possibly have abducted Lukas Branson and kept him hidden for over two years?
This is the third of the DSS Archie Baldrick and DC Ben Travers books – Into the Void, Retribution and now A Virtuous Lie. I happily took the task of reviewing this for Flaxflower, knowing how much I’d enjoyed O’Reilly’s first two books. This is her best yet. A fully rounded detective fiction with great characters throughout, believable plotlines and great development of Baldrick and Travers.
A Virtuous Lie is a less linear storyline than Retribution and is all the better for it. Interweaving histories and personalities with a great twist – in fact more than one great twist. Also a step up from Retribution, are the personal story lines of both detectives. Nicely complex and well written lives interwoven within the overarching framework of their intense careers. The complications of their personal lives give added drama to the whole book while offering Baldrick and Travers greater depth for personal development.
As with the first two books in this series, O’Reilly is a dab hand with dialogue and she brings the scenes alive with great visual clarity. I read the wind as a metaphor and almost a character in itself, sweeping through the town and people, clearing heads and providing relief and clarity, or blowing chilly and cold, adding to shivery moments.
It’s difficult to review the storyline without spoilers so I avoid going into details about the plot. Rest assured it takes personal histories and reviews them in the context of this terrible discovery as new connections are made, past mistakes highlighted with a sincere understanding of how people react, how people are betrayed, how lives are rewritten and not always for the best. Also, O’Reilly continues to trust the reader to remember evidence and never does us the disservice of rehashing unless it sits well within the day-to-day policing process and she never lets it become boring or repetitive.
Thanks, Christina. Thanks again. I’ll await your fourth with great interest.

Review by TJ Ramsay

Title: A Virtuous Lie
Author: Christina O'Reilly
Publisher: Christina O'Reilly
ISBN: 978 0 473 64439 0
RRP: $25
Available: Wheelers Books www.wheelers.co.nz
OR by emailing the author: [email protected]

Comments

Novel has strong characters

14/12/2022

Comments

Life and Death in Birkenhead
by K.M Tarrant

Within the small suburb of Birkenhead lives a monster, one the local residents entrust with their recently departed loved ones. He has been inflicting his atrocities unnoticed. But what happens when he turns his attention to the living?
This is a debut novel by Tarrant about a New Zealand serial killer and it’s a good one. Her characters are strong, her plot line well defined.
Detective Tipene Patrick deserves another case to solve. I found him sympathetic, intelligent and down-to-earth. Tarrant’s people live believable lives and have sincere back stories which nicely explain why people end up on dangerous paths. There is plenty of hopelessness and sadness yet, through it, her people are trying their best, coping how they may. For me, Jazz came across as the most layered character, good side/bad side in a constant moving flux which made him easily the most interesting character.
Tarrant is writing about work she knows and she is able to make the practical work of the back-stage of a funeral home interesting, actually without bogging the reader down in unnecessary details. Always nice to go, ‘I didn’t know that. Cool.’
The plot is linear. Nothing to discover. There are no surprises for the reader. The bad guy is named from the start and we are just following along his gruesome path until he gets his comeuppance.
Gerald had no lights and shades. Being bad to the bone from the get-go leaves no room for slow revealing or shocks. I found Maisie’s life-path such a huge fore-shadowing and knew from that moment how things would pan out. If I would have preferred more challenge in the story and the read, that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it. I did and read it in one sitting.
Tarrant has a nice, believable touch with dialogue and it all flowed smoothly and easily. I did have a question – I wondered why the repetition on page 100? The same information is repeated later on and I could see the point to that but not at page 100.
Life and Death in Birkenhead is a debut novel Tarrant should be proud of. I hope to read more from her in the future.
Thank you for the opportunity to review this enjoyable book.

Review by T.J. Ramsay

Title: Life and Death in Birkenhead
Author: K. M. Tarrant
Publisher: Mary Egan Publishing
ISBN: 9780473634629
RRP: $35
Available: bookshops

Comments

Rich reading in novel

7/12/2022

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A Runner’s Guide to Rakiura
by Jessica Howland Kany

Had I known then about the hunt for buried treasure that has occupied the locals for decades, I may have extended my short visit to Rakiura to try my luck. Darn it!
Maudie would have expressed that much more graphically.
Maudie? Really? She can’t be a Kiwi, because no one here has been called that in the past century. No, she’s from a very different island – straight from Manhattan to Stewart Island. What sort of translocation is that! The Author knows, because she has done it too.
It’s post 9/11 and post Christchurch. Maudie is scarred, literally, and minus a couple of toes. The handicap motivates rather than hinders her determination to run, run, run.
The two locations aren’t the only ones. At times the narration shifts, in time and place, to Monte Casino, Italy 1943-44, with brief visits to Paris.
The story is revealed not in chapters, but in parts divided into sections with subheadings. The majority of the text, narrated by Maudie, is in 1st person present tense, through which she reveals her backstory gradually, also uncovering those of others close to her.
There is more than one mystery to be resolved. One is 75 years old and the locals have long since given up on figuring it out. Maudie arrives pushing a running pram, and carrying her own secrets. The interaction of the two leads to yet another situation that rocks the close island community.
The quirky nature of the narration allows so much information to be inserted into the 400+ pages – details of southern geography with its flora and fauna and cartographic snafus, comments on language differences between USA and NZ, appreciation of poetry in what seems unlikely places, flashes of wartime Italy, and much more. Together it makes for richer reading than most novels. Different fonts mark separate sections, and a graphic of a fishing buoy recurs, inscribed with short phrases – make of them what you will.
Usually, I try to avoid novels of such length, often finding them unnecessarily padded. Not so with A Runner’s Guide to Rakiura, despite the inclusion of the extra information that is always in line with Maudie's character. The richness of the content, the great stable of characters which includes a kākā (“He’s a wild bird with a cat door and a food bowl?”), and of course the hope of finding buried treasure, made reading this one entertaining and a pleasure all the way.
It makes me think I’ll stay longer on Rakiura-Stewart Island next visit.

Review by Bronwyn Elsmore

Title: A Runner’s Guide to Rakiura
Author: Jessica Howland Kany
Publisher: Quentin Wilson Publishing
ISBN: 9780995143852
RRP: $37.99
Available: bookshops

Comments

Author’s best novel yet

Novel has strong characters

Rich reading in novel

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