The Things We Didn’t Know, by Elba Iris Pérez.

 

       
     Eight-year-old Andrea and her six-year-old brother Pablo are on their way to Puerto Rico with their mother.  Mama has grown terminally discontented with life in a U.S. East Coast mill town – which isn’t even a town;  she can’t even shop for food, or socialise with any friends unless her husband Luis takes her in his beloved Oldsmobile, and he will not hear of her learning to drive:  she is effectively his prisoner, subject to every one of his whims.  Which doesn’t mean that he’s a bad man;  he just loves his job at the paper mill, loves his family and doesn’t know why she doesn’t love her life too, which is so much better than Puerto Rico.

            The only way to convince him that all is not well is to leave, to return to the life they had before America, Land of the Free, started singing its siren song – sadly, her children don’t feel the same way, especially when Mama immediately leaves them in the care of her sister Cecilia, a very kind and loving woman who would rather be a man, and lives as one.  It takes several weeks before they are used to their new living arrangements, gradually looking forward to starting school again in a strange environment but, just when they are starting to enjoy their new life with their manly aunt their Mama turns up with a new boyfriend and another sister for them to stay with.  And this sister is very poor to the extent of not having enough for them to eat:  their future looks grim, until Cecilia manages to contact their father – this criminal selfishness of a mother who refuses to mother her children has to stop, and Luis arrives to right the awful wrong his wife has created.

            But this lovely story is about much more than a marriage;  it’s about racism in all its forms:  aunt Cecilia isn’t despised in some quarters because she’s lesbian but because she’s negrito – her father was black and so is she.  Andrea finds that as she grows up, despite being blonde and blue-eyed by some genetic quirk, ‘white’ Americans regard her with suspicion, her first boyfriend’s mother as a typical example.  And her own beloved Papa is horrified and furious that she is choosing to marry a black man – never mind that he’s a University Professor:  he has fuzzy hair!

            Ms Pérez’s debut novel starts in the turbulent 60’s and covers some brutal times and huge changes in American society, especially when so many young men returned from Vietnam in wheelchairs – or coffins.  The Land of the Free is still in a state of discomfit and uncertainty, but there is always hope for it as long as they have writers like her to tell its truths.  FIVE STARS.    

 

 

When the Deep Dark Bush Swallows You Whole,

By Geoff Parkes

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            Just as Aussie Noir has become an established genre in South Pacific Crime writing, New Zealand writers have taken up the baton to produce their own brand of bushy WhoDunnits – and doing pretty well at it too, thank you, as evidenced by (amongst others) Catherine Chidgey, Michael Bennett and Rose Carlyle’s success, for our beautiful country has myriad spaces and places to create mysteries and murders galore.

            Such a place in the 80’s is the small Waikato town of Nashville – fictitious for the purposes of Geoff Parkes’s debut novel, but typical of small towns everywhere:  everyone knows everyone else;  they all love to gossip, and they can be forgiven for that for not much happens of note in Nashville – until a young hitch-hiker goes missing, a Finnish girl on her OE, who was temporarily working as a roustabout in a shearing gang on one of the local farms.  And this is not the first hiker to disappear in the town:  a couple of years before a young woman was last seen just out of town trying to hitch a ride;  someone unknown picked her up and she was never seen again.  The locals are starting to mutter about a Serial-Killer, gossip rubbished by the local police, but they don’t seem to have any clues either, even though HotShot detectives have been sent to investigate from the big cities. 

            It’s a mystery alright, especially for Otago law student Ryan Bradley, home for the holidays and working in the same shearing gang – and lover of Sanna, the missing girl:  he is frantic with worry for her but doesn’t believe he can do anything to help, so stays silent about their affair, thinking that no-one else knows.  Which is rubbish:  someone always knows something.  And he’s mystified by the change in his friendship with Phillip Nash;  growing up they were like brothers, peas-in-a-pod;  now, Phillip avoids him and only speaks if he has to, the excuse being is that Ryan thinks he’s too good for his old friends ‘now that he’s a lawyer-boy’:  there’s lots of anger simmering just under the surface, and lots of grubby secrets, too, which makes for a very satisfactory attempt at plot twists and turns.

            To reveal any more would spoil things, for it’s not just Ryan in the frame, and not all the characters are credible, which is a shame.  Having said that, what I really enjoyed about Geoff Parkes’s writing was the fact that his protagonists are a very good cross-section of society, with all its foibles, weaknesses – and loving-kindness.  FOUR STARS.     

 

Spirit Crossing, by William Kent Krueger.

           

      
      Once again it’s good to meet Cork O’Connor, longtime First Nations investigator and upholder of the law (when he’s not running his burger bar) in beautiful Minnesota, one of the Northern states bordering Canada.  Life is pretty much the same as it was in ‘Fox Creek’, except that his beloved daughter Annie has returned from hard charity work in the barrios of Guatemala, bringing Maria, her new partner with her.  They are returning for the wedding of Cork and Rainey’s son Stephen; it will be a joyous occasion for them all, except that Annie has a secret
that she doesn’t want to reveal until after the festivities are over – in fact she doesn’t want to disclose anything:  she’s just glad to be home once again, in the bosom of her loving family;  everything will be revealed eventually anyway, nothing stays secret for long.

            Meantime, it’s blueberry-picking season – as we all know there is nothing more delicious than those heavenly fruits on one’s breakfast and in pancakes etc, so Cork and his little grandson Waboo (little rabbit) are on their way to a secret site by a cabin in the woods once owned by an old Finnish man who used to swap blueberries for other kinds of food (who needs money when you can use the barter system?).  As Cork thought there is a considerable stash of blueberries, but there is something else which reveals the fact that little  Waboo has a gift for speaking with the dead – which he does by a mound covered with blueberries.  The young Lakota girl dumped in a shallow grave wants Waboo to tell her how to find The Path of Souls.  And it’s not long before the old Finn’s cabin reveals another terrible secret:  another murdered girl, this time from a prominent white family, and it doesn’t take long before the huge publicity following the white girl’s death, that Waboo’s identity is revealed and he has to go into hiding for his life, not only a victim of publicity but to keep him safe from the murderers of the girls:  if he can talk to dead girls, what can he say about the murderers to police?

            Meantime, a huge new oil pipeline is being constructed through tribal land (‘Drill, baby, drill!’) much to Ojibwe outrage, and furious protests have ignited hatred all along its route:  there is much for Cork and his family to navigate and try to change even though the class and racism cards are strongly stacked against them.  They have a strong and faithful ally in William Kent Krueger – long may he record the myriad injustices – and victories – that First Nations people receive.  FIVE STARS.