Thursday, June 12, 2008

Something harrowing in the Garden City

An enthusiastic review for NZ crime novel in the Weekend Australian

CEMETERY LAKE
Paul Cleave - Random House - A$29.95 NZ$34.95

PAUL Cleave begins Cemetery Lake with an abrupt two-word paragraph -- Blue fingernails. -- and then moves forward with almost alarming energy, his noirish narrative propelled in violent fits and starts, through reversals and false solutions, before coming to rest in a grave.
Theodore Tate is a Christchurch private investigator who is barely coping with life. He's exhuming a body for an investigation, but across the cemetery lake his dead daughter is buried, her death the beginning of many losses. As the machinery digging up the grave in front of him shakes the ground in the rain, something floats, bubbling, to the surface of the lake. It looks like a human form, a giant black balloon, followed by several others.
It's the back of a jacket connected to a soccer ball-sized object with hair. What dark secret is Tate uncovering and can he keep a grip on his own life to get to the person responsible?

Cleave's third book establishes itself vividly as a dark detective caper but quickly becomes a nihilistic crime novel. Tate, a disgraced one-time policeman, uses intuition and reason to solve the puzzle of the sodden bodies and brings about some order in a fearful Christchurch. In doing this he honours the detective story's generic touchstones. But in his life are terrible sordid things, made clear to the reader early on, especially something for which the grieving detective continues to evade punishment.
Read the full and enthusiastic review at The Australian online.

1 comment:

Vanda Symon said...

I think it's fantastic that Paul's doing so well overseas waving the flag for New Zealand crime fiction. This book's next in the pile on my bedside table - I look forward to it.