The Boat Shed by Robyn Cotton

Robyn Cotton struck a rich vein of maritime thrills in her 2024 procedural The Jibe, which centred on the case of a maybe-not-accidental death while yachting. In The Boat Shed, as the title hints, her detectives are back on the water, this time after the body of a pyjama-clad 12-year-old girl is found in one of the historic sheds on Rangitoto.

Recurring protagonists Frank Smythe of the Maritime Police Unit and Anahera Raupara, who works in land search and rescue out of the Auckland Central Criminal Investigation Branch, re-team to solve the case, and their investigation gradually reveals tentacles that threaten to spread beyond the grasp of the tight-knit group of investigators.

The dead girl is Asian, likely Indian or Nepalese; DNA testing is ordered. She was subjected to serious abuse and deprivation before she died. The pathologist who conducts the autopsy tells Frank it’s one of the worst cases she’s seen, but it wasn’t the violence that killed her; the cause of death was secondary drowning. The child’s wrist bears a roughly drawn tattoo of an eye with mysterious symbols inside it.

Just as Frank is getting to grips with the case and preparing to hand it over to the Auckland Central team – it’s bigger than his everyday beat of transporting prisoners and dealing with fisheries matters and petty crime – a second body is called in. Another, even younger, girl has been found, washed up on the western shore of the island, and she has the same ethnicity, clothing, injuries, and tattoo as the first Jane Doe.

With no corresponding missing person reports and just one person of interest to pursue in a nearby boatie with a shabby vessel and a carefully vague backstory, Frank and Anahera – no surprise, they stick with the case – have a tough brief, and they set out doing the grunty police work of following up on tips from the public (including one who mentions an apparent suburban brothel staffed by east and south Asian girls), tracing flights and ships from overseas that might have borne the children into the country, and talking to experts, like an anthropology professor and local tattooists who could shed light on the strange body art. The investigators soon develop a suspicion that other girls made the long voyage to the South Pacific with them – but who and where are they?

In what at first seems like a family-oriented subplot but is quickly woven into the main themes of the novel, Anahera’s son Rangi, heretofore the subject of glowing reports from his teachers and budding sports star, is caught watching porn at school. It’s a first offence and he’s lining up potential scholarships to American colleges, so it’s agreed he won’t be excluded from school but required to see a counsellor. He insists it was his first time viewing it, and his worried parents are at pains to help him see the hidden cost of porn, both to the young mind of the teenage viewer and to the girls on the phone screen.

The book juxtaposes the many glories of Tāmaki Makaurau’s natural environment – Frank’s gig as the skipper of a patrol boat has to be one of the best in the New Zealand police – with the bottomless horrors of the commercial exploitation of children from some of the poorest communities in the world and their trafficking to people prepared to pay any price for them. The latter is informed by Cotton’s deep research, including a visit to Kathmandu and liaison with the International Needs Nepal programme which works to educate young women to lift them from poverty and reduce their vulnerability to trafficking.

Perhaps the strongest, and certainly the most heartening, element of The Boat Shed is the look-for-the-helpers reminder it gives: while the motor of the story is some of the worst behaviour humans can exhibit, the atrocities are countered by the best of us, in Frank and Anahera and their colleagues – people who want to do a good day’s work, set the world to rights as best they can, go home and be kind to their loved ones, and get up the next day to do it all again. In Cotton’s waters, the good guys come out ahead.

Reviewer: Stephanie Jones

Self-published