I only became aware of this book by Michael Bennett because the Nerdette podcast chose it as their book of the month for their book club back in April and I only got around to reading it in June.
It’s so good! And it’s not superlong, so if you’re looking for a quick read, I definitely recommend picking up this one, especially if you’re looking for a good mystery/thriller to read on the beach in the last days of summer.
The book starts with one of the first photographers in the 1880s in Australia trying to corral a group of six English soldiers to pose for their picture. The narrator focuses so much on his frustration and his difficulties in getting the six men to hold still long enough for the daguerreotype to finish developing that he neglects to mention until the very end that hanging behind the men, centered in the frame, is a dead Maori chief, hanging by his neck from a pūriri tree with his wrists and ankles bound.
Fast forward to 2022, and Hana Westerman is a Maori woman who is also a police detective. Her ex-husband is the father of her teenaged daughter and also her boss, so her life is complicated, but they manage to make it work. It seems there’s still a lot of love between them, and a hell of a lot of respect, but they manage to keep their personal and professional lives separate.
I don’t want to spoil anything, but if you think about the questions black cops in America have to deal with, Hana has to deal with basically the same thing, although her family doesn’t come right out and call her a traitor to her face. They say it behind her back, but she manages to overhear it at a family gathering, and that’s when she stops going back home to visit.
But a big theme of this book is that you can’t escape your past. Hana has to deal with that as a Maori cop who one participated in shutting down a Maori protest against Pākehās stealing more of their land. There are a lot of ways in which that event comes back to haunt her, and I loved how the book dealt with how she reckoned with that conflict (both externally and internally) because I thought it was handled really well.
Hana encounters the case of a lifetime when someone starts sending her videos of crime scenes anonymously. The first is to an abandoned building where they find a dead body hanging in the same way the dead Maori was hanging in the daguerreotype.
The second is a wide shot of the city of Auckland (where she works as a cop) but at the center of the frame is a building off which a guy recently jumped from the ceiling. Or was he pushed?
He doesn’t seem to have anything in common with the guy whose body was first found in the abandoned building, not least because the first was an unemployed ex-convict and an addict, and the other was a health nut with a good job.
But when Hana finds the same symbol carved into a shed at the site of the “suicide” that was found at the site of the abandoned building, she realizes the two cases are connected. The only question is how?
It turns out the first man killed was a direct descendant of the first soldier in the photo with the dead Maori chief and the second guy was a direct descendant of the second soldier in the photo. By the time Hana and her team realize this, a descendant of the third soldier has already turned up dead and they need to figure out how to stop the killer before he takes three more lives.
It turns out the killer is a Maori man who had tried fighting within the system to get land returned to his people, but even when he was considered to be successful, his people only got 2% of the land that was rightfully owed them. Then his mom died, so to say he’s in a precarious mental state is putting it lightly.
His killing spree is never condoned in the book, but the killer is a sympathetic character because he’s not wrong. Pākehā have taken everything from his people, and when they condescend to give anything back, they give the bare minimum. Of course he’s frustrated.
He claims that, through these killings, he is bringing about utu, which is a Maori belief in balance. It’s not about revenge, because it works both ways. If someone gives you a gift, you owe them a gift of equal or greater value. If someone does you harm, you owe them an equal amount of harm. The killer claims that, by killing the descendants of the soldiers who killed his ancestor, he is bringing about utu.
I don’t know about you, but the title of this book makes me think of eugenics — as in, people actively trying to “better the blood.” Turns out, one of the killer’s mottos is “better the blood of the innocent than no blood at all.” Meaning he knows the people he’s killing are innocent, but he believes their death is necessary for utu.
It’s worth noting that, despite his name, the author is Maori, although, in the author notes, he admits that the tribe he’s writing about in the book is a fictional tribe.