Fallout

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Tito Ihaka, the unkempt, overweight Maori cop, was demoted to Sergeant due to insubordination and pigheadedness. He investigates the unsolved killing of a seventeen-year-old girl at an election night party in a ritzy villa near Auckland. Ihaka is also embroiled in a very personal mystery. A freelance journalist has stumbled across information that Ihaka's father, Jimmy, a trade union firebrand and renegade Marxist, didn't die of natural causes. The stories weave themselves into an exciting climax in an atmosphere of political maneuvering and intrigue surrounding the United States' confrontation with New Zealand over its anti-nuclear stance.

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David Yoon

Time to travel the world and get outside my traditional Western reads. It's off to New Zealand and the godfather of Kiwi crime writing. Paul Thomas' Tito Ihaka is a hulking Maori detective with a penchant for making his own rules.

We've got two cold cases. One involving the death of teenaged girl at a swanky upper crust party, the other is no less than the death of Tito's own father that may not have been the premature heart attack it's been written off as. Throw in another side plot involving a former best friend and disgraced cop and you've got a ripping good yarn.

I'll take Nesbo's Harry Hole over Ihaka any day but translated to the screen, Tito would be just the right kind of neither black or white, imposing menace you wouldn't want be on the wrong side of. This could be a compellingly dark world worth exploring.

February 22, 2015