A KILLING IN WARTIME WINTON
The year is 1943, the month May, the place Winton, Southland. On a bank of the Oreti River the body of a young man has been found. The victim died a violent death, probably inflicted by a ‘kindling axe’. A lack of blood at the riverbank scene indicates that the victim was killed elsewhere and the body later hauled to the riverbank.
The murder victim is readily identified as Randolph Harrington, a United States Marine, a young saxophonist whose band has recently entertained guests at a function at the nearby Whitehouse Hotel.
Who would violently murder such a harmless person? And why? These are the grisly, baffling circumstances which open the murder-mystery novel Wrongdoings by LA Joye (Lauren Sleeman).
Enter the police officers in charge of the investigation; soon-to-retire Detective Inspector John MacBride, a mentally damaged veteran of the First World War, and his assistant, the much younger Detective Constable Colin Abercrombie. Diligent, decent coppers of the old school, MacBride and Abercrombie begin their investigations.
There is much to admire in Wrongdoings, most notably its evocation of 1943 wartime rural New Zealand, as exemplified by its hauntingly beautiful cover image. Real events are woven dexterously into the who-dunnit: the effects of Great War shellshock on MacBride, the schism between the wartime lives of United States servicemen and ordinary Kiwis, the Hyde rail disaster of 1943. Dialogue is authentically rendered, the cast of colourful characters dexterously drawn. The reader will never look at Southland in the same way again.
Reviewer: Graeme Lay
Lauren Sleeman