Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
A popular fifteen-year-old girl is strangled to death at a school camp on Auckland's west coast. The posing of the body suggests a sexual motive. Nick Knight, a week into his role as a newly promoted Detective Sergeant, is tasked with the critical job of leading the Suspects Team. Nick - who turned his back on a lucrative career as a lawyer - is well-versed at dealing with the dark sides of human nature. With no shortage of suspects, he sets out on the trail of the murderer, grappling his own personal demons along the way. But are things really as they seem?
In case you hadn't noticed there's a number of debut novels recently out of New Zealand, often written by authors with a policing or related background, many of them telegraphing potential for interesting things to come. THE STUDENT BODY is Serious Fraud Office investigator Simon Wyatt's first novel, written while on sick leave recovering from a rare, and potentially life-threatening autoimmune disorder.
The central character in this novel, Detective Sergeant Nick Knight, is a little bit different from current day crime fictional norms in that he's a young, not yet cynical cop, in a murder enquiry team after a few years of adult sex crimes investigations. Readers may see something in the link between his experience of sex crimes, and the death of a young female student, found semi-naked, strangled and dumped in the bush near a school camp. From the circumstances, sexual motivation is upper-most on everyone's mind. But there are secrets to be found amongst her family, school teachers and friends, the community around the camp, as well as those in her home neighbourhood.
Wyatt's background in policing is very obvious in THE STUDENT BODY, deployed to great effect when revealing the inner workings of CIB, not as effective when describing characters in ways that have more than a whiff of wanted poster about them. It's obviously an extremely difficult balancing act to get the information on internal workings and readability right though, and whilst at some level details can be fascinating, it's not quite as successful when the reader can't quite shake the sense of an exam coming up. Having said that the personal touches: the baking provided by lower ranks in the team, and the difficult family dynamics, in particular, are well done.
Because the story is told from Nick's point of view it's hard to avoid the idea that he might not be seeing the full picture on some things and his observations about family members, relationships with colleagues etc have just the slightest feeling of unreliability about them. On the other hand, there's some nice sprinklings of humour dotted throughout and not just the gallows style that could be expected in a police procedural.
It's in the shadows of Nick's personality that there's particularly interesting hints. He's not perfect, he's self-centred, and on the face of it his difficult relationships with a lot of people could be coming from both sides. Which probably also sums up THE STUDENT BODY. It's not perfect, it's got the odd continuity issue, a few clanging terminology / naming problems, and an ending that reads like a lot of heavy lifting of a lot of elements in a big hurry. Overall, however, THE STUDENT BODY is a promising first take, and it will be worth seeing what happens in any follow-up novel.
Karen Chisholm is one of Australia's leading crime reviewers. She created Aust Crime Fiction in 2006, reviews for Newtown Review of Books, and is a Judge of the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel and the Ned Kelly Awards. She kindly shares and republishes her reviews of crime and thriller novels written by New Zealanders on Crime Watch as well as on Aust Crime Fiction.
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