When
the Deep Dark Bush Swallows You Whole,
By Geoff Parkes
.
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.
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