Better the Blood
Michael Bennett
An absorbing, clever debut thriller that speaks to the longstanding injustices faced by New Zealand’s indigenous peoples, by an acclaimed Maori screenwriter and director
A tenacious Maori detective, Hana Westerman is juggling single motherhood, endemic prejudice, and the pressures of her career in Auckland CIB. Led to a crime scene by a mysterious video, she discovers a man ritualistically hanging in a secret room and a puzzling inward-curving inscription. Delving
into the investigation after a second, apparently unrelated, death, she uncovers a chilling connection to a historic crime: 160 years before, during the brutal and bloody British colonization of New Zealand, a troop of colonial soldiers unjustly executed a Maori chief.
Hana recognizes the murders as utu—the Maori tradition of rebalancing, whether for a personal slight or, now, for a crime committed eight generations ago. There were six soldiers in the British troop, and since descendants of two of the soldiers have been killed, four more potential
murders remain. Hana realizes she is hunting New Zealand’s first serial killer.
The pursuit soon becomes frighteningly personal, recalling the painful event, two decades before, when Hana, then a new cop, was part of a police team sent to end by force a land rights occupation by indigenous peoples on the same ancestral mountain where the chief was killed, calling once
more into questionher loyalty to her roots. Worse still, a genealogical link to the British soldiers brings the case terrifyingly close to Hana’s own family. Twisty and thoughtprovoking, Better the Blood is the debut of a remarkable new talent in crime fiction.
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