RETURN TO BLOOD
by Michael Bennett (Simon & Schuster, $37.99)
Two years ago, Michael Bennett flung open the doors of the crime-writers' club of Aotearoa with his first thriller, Better the Blood. Its star was a strong Māori woman: Detective Senior Sergeant Hana Westerman, an Auckland police officer torn between her heritage and the Pākehā power structures she worked within. This uneasiness became a crisis when she joined a team investigating a fast-moving sequence of ritualistic murders, Tāmaki Makarau's first serial killer. It didn't take long for Hana to work out that they were dealing with a highly intelligent person broken by rage over a historical colonial atrocity against Māori. As she got closer to solving the case, he directed his wrath at her.
Bennett's debut provided a fresh new perspective, and his experience as a veteran TV and film screenwriter bled through into the book's plain-speaking, expository style. Unusually for fiction, the book included Māori words and phrases with footnotes of translation, part of the author's mission to broaden the use of te reo.
Bennett earned wide acclaim for Better the Blood here and in international markets, and his was judged best first novel at the Ngaio Marsh Awards.
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