Acclaimed Māori writer Michael Bennett jumpstarts a projected thriller series about police detective Hana Westerman with the thoroughly absorbing Better the Blood.
The past has a disconcerting way of reemerging in this sharply observed novel, which begins with the painstaking efforts of a daguerreotypist in 1863 attempting to capture for posterity the proud cadre of British soldiers standing around the Māori man they just hanged. Meanwhile, in modern-day New Zealand, Detective Senior Sergeant Westerman's past is catching up with her when video footage from earlier in her career resurfaces, documenting her unsympathetic policing of fellow Māori people at a protest. It's one of several videos she receives from an anonymous source as a bizarre series of killings begins to emerge around Auckland. Besides the videos, the murders also seem to be linked by a single signature left at the crime scene: a drawing "like something from nature, the perfect spiral on a hermit crab shell. The inward-circling meteorological map of a cyclone approaching landfall.... A shape that's organic, harmonious, pleasing to the eye."
Bennett writes about Māori culture and history with generosity and care, reflected in the final acknowledgments paid to those in his community who lent him additional insights and guidance. He also crafts a compelling detective in Hana Westerman, recently divorced from her senior officer husband, with whom she co-parents their teenage daughter, an aspiring singer and Māori rights activist. Under Bennett's strong command of tension in all directions, Better the Blood is a magnificently arranged confrontation with histories personal and public. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness