Reviewed by Craig Sisterson
On the remote West Coast of the South Island, vast forests stretch out between mountain ranges and rugged beaches. There, in the small town of Koraha, not a lot happens - until a young girl with blood on her hands walks out of the bush and into the local store, collapsing to the floor.
She can't - or won't - speak to anyone. It's the town's sole policeman who recognises her face. She looks exactly like a local girl who disappeared twenty years ago. She has the same red hair. The same green eyes. What horrors has she left behind in the bush? Who will come looking for her? And what secrets are about to come to light?
It had been a long time between drinks, crime novel wise, for New Zealand policeman and award-winning indie filmmaker Stef Harris. Twenty years after he published his second novel, Harris returns to the page for a third outing with Double Jeopardy, a muscular, ‘old school’ crime thriller inspired by his time onset in Boston many years ago with Mel Gibson and Kiwi director Martin Campbell, during the shooting of the film Edge of Darkness.
While Harris has spent thirty years policing the streets of New Zealand cities and small towns, in Double Jeopardy he soaks readers into the gun-heavier culture of American law enforcement. Frank Winter is a retired county sheriff and former Boston detective whose family was shattered many years ago. Now he’s working as a late-night janitor while regularly visiting his ex-wife Mary as she slips deeper and deeper into dementia in her care home.
When Bruno Krupke is released on parole after twenty years, will Frank deliver on his well-televised drunken promise from the courthouse steps to shoot the man acquitted of killing Frank’s daughter Evelyn (while convicted of other killings), if he’s ever released? As more and more has been taken from Frank in the years since, he’s a shell of his former self, but has little left to lose.
Timid detective Nunzio Arabito, teased by his colleagues for his spreadsheet-first and technology-reliant style of investigations, is tasked with ensuring the dangerous Krupke – who couldn’t be retried for Evelyn’s murder even if Frank found new evidence – integrates back into society, and that Frank doesn’t kill him. Krupke meanwhile swears he’s just looking to get on with his life and run his fast-growing business legally selling equipment to far-right militias. All very constitutional, if worrisome.
Overall, Harris delivers an action-packed tale laced with humour, several fascinating characters, and some interesting storyline swerves along the way to an explosive conclusion. It’s the kind of novel that’s easy to envisage onscreen, the sort of thing Clint Eastwood or Gene Hackman may have starred in fifteen years ago as the cantankerous yet engaging lead, Frank Winter.
Well worth a read.
[This review was first published in the Summer 2023 issue of Deadly Pleasures magazine in the USA]
Craig Sisterson is a lawyer turned writer, editor, podcast host, awards judge, and event chair. He's the founder of the Ngaio Marsh Awards, co-founder of Rotorua Noir, author of Macavity and HRF Keating Award-shortlisted non-fiction work SOUTHERN CROSS CRIME, editor of the DARK DEEDS DOWN UNDER anthology series, and writes about books for magazines and newspapers in several countries.
No comments:
Post a Comment