Book

Better the blood

Bennett, Michael 1964- (author.).

Record details

ISBN: 0802162657
ISBN: 9780802162656
Physical Description: 342 pages ; 21 cm.
print
Edition: First Grove Atlantic paperback editon.
Publisher: New York, NY : Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, 2024
Copyright: ©2022
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- Recently Published: 4 / 5.0

Content descriptions

General Note:

"First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Simon Schuster UK Ltd." -- title page verso.

Summary, etc.:

"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 a 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 when as a new cop two decades before, Hana 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"--