There is often pressure on New Zealand crime writers to set their books somewhere more ‘marketable’. Two new novels happily ignore that advice. Gavin Strawhan’s Slash gives us small-town forestry country, cyclone damage, gangs, meth and exploited Pacific workers, while Icefall by Marie Connolly gives us glaciers, SAR teams, and a farm in Fairlie. Both are excellent reads.
Slash is a fast, muddy ride through a landscape devastated by Cyclone Gabrielle. It’s a sequel of sorts to his bestselling debut published last year, The Call, which first introduced his protagonist, former detective Honey Chalmers. When we meet her again, she is no longer in the force — she’s walked away after a case that ended in a brutal shootout and the death of the man she loved. She’s now drinking a bit too much, having wry (and very funny) conversations with her dead lover, and generally trying to work out what to do with herself.
A chance encounter drags her back in. She agrees to help Vinnie, a recovering addict, and his son Steve, a serving cop, work out what has happened to Vinnie’s other son, Nick, an armed robber, murder suspect, and missing since Cyclone Gabrielle tore through their East Coast town. That town is the fictional Bergeton, and is a character in its own right: battered by the cyclone, choked by forestry slash, thick with small-town gossip and cheap meth, and full of young people who cannot see a future.
From there the story spirals ever outward. There are a lot of characters in Slash. There’s the forestry company’s very self-interested manager Kirsty. There’s a pair of slash protesters, Tui and Debbie, and Nick’s dodgy co-offender Ollie. There’s Kath, a farmer whose parents have been murdered. The book travels to Fiji, where an exploited Pacific forestry worker called Timi holds a large piece of the puzzle. Honey’s old friend Michelle turns up to help (and a senior cop, DS Bennett, circles the case from an official direction. It’s a book that keeps twisting right to the last page, and half the fun is not knowing where it will lurch next.
What makes Slash work is Honey herself. She is flawed in all the right ways — brave, impulsive, funny, guilty, and carrying what she describes as PTSD from her last case. There’s a fantastic moment early on where she goes to the supermarket for brown rice and vegetables and comes home, via a couple of diversions, with a bottle of Scotch and a bag of salt and vinegar chips. Her name is sweet, but there is a sting behind it, and Strawhan has grown her considerably since The Call — she is more damaged now, more reckless, and somehow more likeable for it.
The supporting cast is unusually good. Vinnie, in particular, is beautifully drawn — grief, guilt and dry alcoholism all held in the one man — and the tenderness that develops between him and Honey is handled with restraint. Ollie looks one-dimensional at first and turns out to be anything but; Strawhan is patient with him, returning again and again to dig a little deeper.
The plot moves at a near-breakneck pace, mostly from Honey’s point of view with short cutaways into Nick, Kirsty and others to fill in the gaps. From a pure crime-genre point of view it is very well constructed: exciting, twisty, morally messy, and full of people who do bad things without being the actual villain. But the book has one or two limbs too many — the Fiji meth thread in particular feels as if it belongs in the next novel — and I felt that the very final revelation about who really did what to Nick was a twist too far.
The title is doing double duty — slash as violence, slash as the forestry debris that turns a bad cyclone into a catastrophe. One careless act, a chain of consequences. That is really what the book is about: law, justice and guilt, and the considerable distance between the first two.
*
Icefall by Marie Connolly is a very different animal. Where Slash runs, Icefall walks — deliberately, thoughtfully, and occasionally at what could be considered a glacial pace.
Her thriller is a slow, elegant unpicking of a very old secret buried in a glacier. The premise is good. In the early 1990s, four ambitious professionals set up a business. It makes them all eye-watering amounts of money, with some quietly corrupt help from a government employee. When he becomes inconvenient, they organise a climbing trip on the Hooker Glacier from which he does not return. Twenty-five years later, students measuring ice retreat find a body emerging from the icefall — and, only days after that, one of the original four is murdered in Christchurch.
The victim is Ben, a retired accountant who has spent his later years quietly volunteering to help ex-prisoners rebuild their lives, and turning out — to everyone’s surprise, including his own — to be very good at it. The remaining three are: Alice, a sharp and ruthless defence lawyer; Sir Peter, a wealthy philanthropist very fond of his knighthood; and Ian, a retired farmer now living quietly in Fairlie, surfing, and slipping into early-onset dementia. When the police realise Ben had rung all three of them shortly before his death to say he intended to come clean, all three become suspects.
Enter Dr Nellie Prayle, a clinical psychologist who assisted police on a previous case (in Connolly’s first novel) and is brought in again here to help with interviews and to advise on the mind of a murderer. She is calm, cerebral, well-educated, well-liked, and — this is my one real quibble with her — a bit too sorted. She has the house, the friends, the moderate wine intake and the tasteful love interest bubbling along in the background. She is very good at her job, but I like my crime-solvers a little more broken. Nellie would absolutely have come home from the supermarket with the brown rice.
The investigation team is large — eight detectives, plus SAR, plus a mountaineering contact, plus the Serious Fraud Office — and this is where the book struggles. I found myself flipping back to the character list at the front more often than I’d like, and because there are so many police, individual detectives tend to embody a single trait each (the one who leaps to conclusions, the calm one, and so on) rather than becoming people. Fewer characters, more qualities per character, would have served the story better.
But when Icefall is good, it’s very good. The rich are wonderfully drawn — Alice and Sir Peter (and Sir Peter’s wife) are entertainingly outraged at the indignity of being interviewed by anyone in a polyester uniform. Ian is genuinely moving: a man who understands, in the lucid gaps, exactly what he has done and what he has lost. Ben, in death, becomes the moral centre of the novel — the one who tried to atone and was killed for it. His story carries the book’s real theme, which is guilt and what, if anything, you can do with it once it is yours.
The setting is a triumph. Connolly has clearly done her research, and it shows without ever tipping into a lecture: the Hooker Glacier and hut, the retreat of the ice, the history of the Clyde Dam, the workings of a Citizens Advice Bureau, the leather-and-architecture interiors that a certain kind of New Zealand money buys itself. You can feel the cold coming off the glacier and sink into the couches of the mansion.
The plot solves itself largely through interviews, forensics and long careful conversations. I could see rather more of it coming than I would have liked, though the identity of the killer came as genuine surprise.
If I had one gentle note for the author, it would be about the opening. The whole premise rests on a missing government employee not being properly looked for at the time, and I never quite believed it. Every crime novel gets one credibility stretch, and Icefall spends its on page one.
Both Icefall and Strawhan’s Slash share a preoccupation with the gap between the law and justice, and with how people live — or don’t — with what they’ve done. In Slash, Honey Chalmers carries her guilt loudly, in bad decisions and worse dinners. In Icefall, Ben, Alice, Sir Peter and Ian have carried theirs quietly for 25 years, and it turns out the ice was never going to hold forever.
A small plea, though, from a grateful reader: Marie Connolly, please cut down the cast; Gavin Strawhan, perhaps one fewer side story, thanks. Keep it simple for those of us who are trying to keep up.
Slash by Gavin Strawhan (Allen & Unwin, $37.99) and Icefall by Marie Connolly (Quentin Wilson Publishing, $37.50) are available in bookstores nationwide.
