Genre: krimi
Goodreads meta-data 272 pages, rated 3.7 by 80 litizens.
Verdict: The satire has become sanctimonious.
Maori detective Tito Ihaka is assigned a cold case by the Commissioner, who is nearing retirement and would like this one cleared up because it was the Commissioner’s first murder case many years ago and he failed to resolve it. Now he puts the impossible and impossible to stop Ihaka on the impossible case. Done right that would be enough material for the novel.
However, we have a parallel development when Ihaka learns that his father’s death years ago, attributed to a heart attack, may have been murder.
There is indeed a parallel of sorts. Ihaka finds the nouveau riche involved in the cold case a tiresome set of villains and he finds the ardent trade unionists involved in his father’s death a tiresome set of villains. I agreed on both counts: tiresome.
All the usual clichés are present, an obstructive superior, a dysfunctional home life, lying witnesses, bossy civilians, duplicitous politicians…. Nary a breath of fresh air is to be found among these clichés.
It seems, like Christopher Foyle, Ihaka is the only just man.
Paul Thomas
I have read the first three titles in this series chronicling the investigations of Tito Ihaka in New Zealand, and I found the early titles to be whip-smart without the preaching in these pages: ‘Old School Tie’ (1994), ‘Inside Dope’ (1995), and ‘Guerrilla Season’ (1996). But in this one — written long after the previous title in the series — Thomas seems to be engaging in some social criticism about the nouveau riche or something, and nearly every page consists of backstories. The result is that movement, action, scene, development are absent. It was like reading the notes for a novel, but not the novel itself.
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