Carved in Blood by Michael Bennett

The nature of New Zealand’s creative industries demands that its craftspeople be able to turn their hands to anything: visual artists are also writers, directors are editors and screenwriters, and authors dance between fiction and non-fiction, short stories and novels, different genres, sometimes journalism and features, maybe poetry. Even by these flexible standards, Michael Bennett is special.

His extensive filmography in numerous below-the-line roles in film and TV includes his own adaptation for the screen of In Dark Places, his first book, about the travesty of justice that was the Teina Pora case. It won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Non-Fiction Book and revealed Bennett’s talent for prising open the minds and homes of the people on his pages, whether real or imagined, so easily and casually that the reader feels they can walk right in, take a seat, and observe.

Speaking of special: Bennett’s debut novel Better the Blood (2022), about a contemporary killing spree rooted in the historical execution of a Māori chief, was widely acclaimed and broke a stubborn barrier in New Zealand literature when it became the first detective novel to be shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. It was published internationally in at least nine languages, a signal of Bennett’s ability to translate a story grounded in Aotearoa specifics into a broadly connective narrative.

He does that once more in Carved in Blood, the superb third installment in what is now a series (after last year’s Return to Blood), which again features Māori ex-detective Hana Westerman and her whānau – dad Eru, ex Jaye, a Detective Inspector, daughter Addison. Carved in Blood opens with joy – with Addison and her partner PLUS 1 planning their engagement party to coincide with the rising of Matariki, the heralding of new beginnings in te ao Māori – before plunging into sorrow and horror when Jaye is shot twice upon intervening in a bottle store robbery.

As he lies in an induced coma and the hunt for the assailant begins, Hana returns from her small hometown of Tātā Bay to Auckland and Sebastian Kang, her ex-police colleague for whom she now does the odd private investigation job. Their relationship has been deepening for some time, and here, in the first act, it is consummated – to use an old-fashioned term and to add another ingredient to Hana’s complicated brew of responsibilities. Sebastian’s quiet, unflashy devotion comes as a surprise to Hana but not the reader: Bennett’s stories are filled with good people who show up for one another in both ordinary and ghastly moments.

About Hana, who is the reason this novel and its predecessors work so well as tense, dramatic reads, the kind you fall into readily and emerge from slowly, blinking and thinking. Carved in Blood is full of twists and threats, easily absorbed as a profoundly satisfying thriller, and Hana is as real and flesh-and-blood a figure as you will find in current Aotearoa fiction, a testament to Bennett’s knowledge of how cops operate (In Dark Places contains a wealth of police lore from ex-officer Tim McKinnel and others), and attunement to the inner lives and cares of women: he has said the character of Hana is informed by his partner, mum, aunties, sisters, daughters.

It makes the reader worry about her, and whether her intelligence and intuitiveness and plain goodness can be enough to shield her. When Toa Davis, the young Māori man suspected of Jaye’s shooting, is traced as a potential courier to an Asian organised crime group which moves narcotics into and around New Zealand, even as an anonymous woman calls the crisis helpline where Addison volunteers to insist he’s being set up, it seems like the underbelly might be extending a gigantic fist upward to seize Hana and her small, intrepid posse.

More than that, in stirring the novel’s insistent, encircling suspense as to where Toa Davis is and what he is really responsible for, and whether evil – however you define it – can ever really be confronted or contained, Bennett seems to be writing not just to entertain but to provoke, teach, and document some of the imbalances of 2020s Aotearoa from an indigenous perspective.

Toa wouldn’t get the benefit of the doubt in a carceral system more than half-filled by Māori people, who represent less than one-fifth of the general population – a distortion many New Zealanders are untroubled by, if they ever think about it, but which, Bennett writes, every brown cop must confront at some point: “You figure out your own balance sheet, you work out if you can look at yourself in the mirror. And you carry on.” Perhaps a writer does this too, and his work is a way of evening that tilted ledger.

(Standard disclaimer for an ‘installment’ novel: you needn’t have read either of the previous Westerman stories to derive maximum satisfaction from this one, but I hope you do.)

Reviewer: Stephanie Jones

Simon & Schuster