CONTAINMENT
A cargo to die for
Vanda Symon,
Penguin Books - $28

Bookman Beattie reviewed this book on Radio New Zealand's Nine to Noon programme this morning. What follows is something along the lines of what The Bookman said to Kathryn Ryan on air.

This is a 300+ page cracker of a contemporary crime fiction novel set in and around Dunedin where of course the author lives so she knows her location well which shows in her superb descriptions of both the city and Aramoana the tiny, often wind-swept settlement north of the city known for its holiday homes, cribs as they call them in the south, its albatross colony and of course for the infamous mass shooting back in 1990 when 12 people were executed.

The story begins with a container ship, the Lauretia Express, going aground just off Aramoana resulting in containers being washed up and before long the Otago locals are out in huge numbers plundering anything they can from the resultant bounty that is washed ashore. Coincidentally off duty Detective Constable Sam Shephard, Sam is short for Samantha by the way, is staying in a crib at Aramoana that weekend but after going down to the beach to check the scene she is brutally assaulted when she tries to stop a blatant piece of theft.

When she recovers a couple of weeks later and is back at work she is assigned to what appears to be a routine investigation into a diving accident off the coast but the post mortem examination proves that the man didn’t die from drowning but rather his body had been stuffed into a wetsuit after he had been killed onshore.

What follows is a compelling whodunnit with all the usual twists and turns so loved by readers of the crime fiction genre like me.

Detective Constable Sam Shephard is one of those wonderfully drawn but comparatively few women protagonists in this genre, it is totally male dominated of course, and in many ways she reminds me of Sara Paretsky’s Chicago-based V.I.Warshawski and Sue Grafton’s California-based Kinsey Millhone. These three women are all characters that I like immensely, high achieving, determined, sassy and feisty women, single most of the time but with a series of ill-fated relationships behind them, fitness enthusiasts who are into running, but they are all quite stubborn and often infuriating as well with their frequently chaotic personal lives.

Sam Shephard comes from a farming background, she started in Symon’s first book, Overkill, as a sole charge police constable in the Southland town of Mataura before joining the CIB in Dunedin at the bottom rung of detective training in the second novel, The Ringmaster.

So this is the third novel in which she is featured and I’m pleased to say that we are promised a fourth in 2010. I just hope she can sort out her relationship with her wonderful, long-suffering boyfriend Paul Frost who is a detective a couple of hours away in Gore whom she describes as a more mature and handsome version of Ben Affleck but whom she doesn’t treat well.

The author is a young specialist crime fiction writer, and I see a long, successful career ahead for her if she can maintain this standard of writing and rate of output. Crime fiction readers tend to be an impatient lot and want a new book every year from the authors they follow. At the back of CONTAINMENT there is a brief extract from the next book from Symon, BOUND. Bring it on I say!