An absorbing, clever debut thriller that speaks to the longstanding
injustices faced by New Zealand's indigenous peoples, by an acclaimed
Māori screenwriter and director
A tenacious Māori detective, Hana Westerman juggles 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 an historic
crime: 160 years before, during the brutal and bloody British
colonization of New Zealand, a troop of colonial soldiers unjustly
executed a Māori Chief.
Hana realizes that the murders are utu--the Māori tradition of
rebalancing for the 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 is
thus 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 question her 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 thought-provoking, Better the
Blood is the debut of a remarkable new talent in crime fiction.
