New Zealand murder mystery marvelous

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/03/2022 (1393 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Two masked and gloved thugs break into a grand house in Dunedin, gag a woman and tie her hands and feet to a chair, then calmly blow off her husband’s face with a shotgun and walk out the door.

She fights nausea, but is perilously close to suffocation before their teenage son arrives home from band practice.

And off we go in Bound, a superb thriller from New Zealand author Vanda Symon — published locally in 2011 but only now reaching bookshelves and library stacks in the rest of the English-speaking world.

Our protagonist is police Detective Sam Shephard, newly promoted and five feet of gumption and sleuthing genius — and an inability to get along with jerks at any level, but particularly the rich and powerful.

When Shephard introduces herself by name, try not to hear the accent of D.S. Mike Shepherd of the wonderful Brokenwood Mysteries TV series — go ahead, try.

The motive for the murder and who benefits from the man’s death are murky, especially when it develops that he was involved in dealing some unsavoury products that made the chief suspects richer by the day.

They would be the two leading hoods in the oceanside paradise of Dunedin, a violent don and his creepy first lieutenant.

No motive for the murder, but the evidence points to the two gangsters, convincing the rest of the Dunedin police department that they’ve got their guilty villains.

But Shephard — who could have seen this coming? — has her spidey sense tingling that the evidence is just a little too convenient. And as odious as the two men and their wives undoubtedly are, she starts to think that when the women alibi their husbands, that they could just be telling the truth.

Here’s where backstory kicks in.

The two gangsters are believed to have killed a Dunedin police officer and seriously wounded D.C. Smithy, one of Shephard’s colleagues who has gone from a cheery fellow to a sullen perpetual downer.

The murdered cop has been replaced in the unit by Paul, who’s in a secret relationship with Sam.

And her boss, D.I. Johns, is an awful human being who believes he can get the best work out of people by humiliating, belittling and constantly screaming in rage at them, while taking credit for their success and delegating blame to them for his own failures.

Not to overlook her dying father — and her mother, who treats Sam just as shabbily through passive aggression as does her bellowing boss.

It should surprise nobody that Bound soon becomes a murders mystery, plural. This is a terrific whodunit, howdunit and whydunit that takes its magical New Zealand setting for granted and doesn’t go out of its way to explain everything local to us outsiders.

Author, pharmacist and radio broadcaster Symon said by email from New Zealand that she’s now writing her sixth Sam Shephard book after taking time off to do her PhD on — wait for it — communication of science in crime fiction.

And Symon has rewritten Bound and her other four Sam Shephard books to “make them more Kiwi” after being initially told that localizing her tales would turn away international readers. Just as with D.I. Johns, how some people ever get into management?

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin was happy that murder didn’t mar his time in Dunedin. He hopes to return there with his wife someday.