A striking debut and a significant addition to Indigenous literature.
Hana Westerman, an Auckland cop with Māori roots, goes up against an Indigenous serial killer looking to avenge England's brutal oppression of New Zealand's native people 160 years ago.
“Better the blood of the innocent than none at all,” says the killer, for whom the horrors of the past are kept alive by the daguerreotype of six British soldiers celebrating with the corpse of a tribal chief hanging behind them. His plan is to kill six people with ties to the original offenders. The case awakens Hana's deep guilt over roughly policing fellow Māori during a land rights protest 18 years ago, in particular a silver-haired woman Hana later learns is the mother of the serial killer, Poata James Raki, a distinguished legal professor suspended for his increasingly radical views. Jaye Hamilton, Hana's ex-husband and superior on the force, assures her she was just doing her job at the protest, but their 17-year-old daughter, Addison, an activist pop singer who was one of Raki's most admiring students, is appalled her mother did such a thing. It's a falling-out the killer is all too happy to exploit. However heinous his actions, Raki is in full, articulate command of the truth regarding the past and present—and Hana knows it. Making his fiction debut, Māori screenwriter and director Bennett establishes himself as an excellent storyteller. As well executed as the murder story is (an unneeded subplot aside), the book's immersion in tribal culture and history makes the greatest impact, lending complexity and sweep to the narrative. Bennett's use of Indigenous terms and names (while providing a running glossary) adds to the novel's resonance. One can only hope this is the beginning of a series.
A striking debut and a significant addition to Indigenous literature.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-8021-6060-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s just as exhausting as it sounds, but it may be the most ambitious spy novel you’ve ever read.
What happens when an eminent mystery novelist collaborates with an award-winning journalist on a spy thriller? Pretty much everything you can imagine.
While food blogger Alice Li is in retreat from her overbearing mother, famous Chinese dissident Vivien Li, in a restaurant bathroom, the alarm goes off. And not just the fire alarm, but every alarm in the city, the country, and around the world. Their triggering is clearly an act of terrorism, and the silencing of all those alarms, which comes as suddenly and inexplicably as their screeching, is anything but reassuring. Vivien spirits her daughter off to the White House, where Grant McAllister, the director of National Intelligence, informs Alice that her friend and fellow blogger Liam Palmer has just been fished from the Hong Kong harbor. McAllister and Alan Zhou, head of the China Mission Center, are convinced Liam knew something about those alarms, and President Fraser Pardington is determined to do whatever he can to prevent a sequel. He fails, of course, and the second act of global terrorism is even more disastrous than the first. All the president’s men and women initially believe the threat comes from the Chinese government, and Chinese President Chen Jiayang thinks the Americans might be behind it. Alice and Vivien race around the globe to track down the culprit, and what they find will knit together the fates of Alice’s family, the U.S. and China, and the history of the world as we know it.
It’s just as exhausting as it sounds, but it may be the most ambitious spy novel you’ve ever read.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9781250412522
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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