WORD Christchurch hosts two authors who are HUGE in crime writing: Aotearoa's own Michael Bennett and Ireland's Dervla McTiernan who has made Australia her home. Book your tickets! The event is at Tūranga on Tuesday 13 May, 6pm to 7pm.
Both authors have just released new books. Carved in Blood is the third book in Michael Bennett's Hana Westerman series, while Dervla McTiernan's The Unquiet Grave is the fourth book of the popular Cormac Reilly series.
Michael Bennett (Ngati Pikiao, Ngati Whakaue) rose to fame when he wrote In Dark Places (2016), highlighting the plight of Teina Pora, a young man wrongly convicted for the 1993 murder of Susan Burdett. In Dark Places won the 2017 Ngaio Marsh Award for Crime Non-Fiction.
A writer and director in film and television, Bennett adapted In Dark Places for the screen in 2018. He's worked on Outrageous Fortune and Maddigan's Quest, a Margaret Mahy story, and collaborated with Ant Sang on a graphic novel, Helen and the Go-Go Ninjas.
Most recently Bennett wrote and produced Vegas, a TV series adapted from Ray Berards' book, Inside The Black Horse, and The Gone - a moody and atmospheric collaboration with Irish and Kiwi actors, popular in Ireland and New Zealand.
Bennett's Hana Westerman series introduced the engaging and complex characters of Hana, a Māori policewoman, and her daughter Addison, a DJ and activist in the Rainbow community. The series begins with the powerful and confronting Better the Blood, in which Bennett used the police procedural trope to tell a heart-breaking story of shameful and abhorrent acts of colonisation in Aotearoa's history. The story's plot centres on a murderer enacting utu on the descendants of English soldiers responsible for the historic execution and violation of a revered Rangatira in the requisition of beloved iwi land on a headland in Auckland for a military base.
Better the Blood, Bennett's first crime novel, won the Best First Novel category at the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards and was nominated for the Jan Medlicott Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (NZ), the ILP John Creasey (New Blood) Award at the prestigious Dagger Awards for Crime Fiction (U.S.), and a Barry Award (Australia).
Dervla McTiernan hails from Ireland, and now lives in Western Australia. Trained in corporate law, McTiernan now works in for the Australian Mental Health Commision.
Her gritty Cormac Reilly police procedural series, set in a small town in County Mayo, Ireland, is hugely popular with crime readers internationally. Set in Ireland, the series is character-driven, featuring a caring and clever policeman in the Garda Síochána, the Irish National Police and Security Service.
McTiernan also writes stand-alone novels; The Murder Rule and What Happened To Nina, a novella, The Wrong One and a short-story collection, The Sisters. What Happened to Nina? is a stomach-churning missing person's story with many points of view. It's also character-rich and setting plays a major part in the story of childhood sweethearts who climb and hike together, before Nina suddenly disappears.
The conflicted perspectives in this book are terrific; particularly Nina's parents, desperate to find their daughter and the truth. McTiernan studies the lengths parents are willing to go to when protecting their offspring: skilfully relaying the fear, grief and frustration parents feel when a child - even an adult child - goes missing, while also examining what happens when the press and social media become judge and jury, poisonous vultures feeding on despair.
If you haven't read this astounding novel, I recommend it. What Happened to Nina has been nominated for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award (U.S) and the ITW Award for Best Standalone Mystery Novel this year.
Dervla McTiernan won a Barry Award (Australia) for Best Paperback original for The Good Turn (2022) and the International Thriller Writers Award for Best Paperback original for The Scholar (2020).
In 2019 The Ruin, the first book in the Cormac Reilly series, won the Barry Award for Best Paperback original, a Davitt Award for Australian Crime Fiction by women, and a Ned Kelly Award for Best First Novel.
The Murder Rule has been adapted for television on Apple TV, while The Ruin has been optioned by Colin Farrell's Chapel Place Productions and Hopscotch Features.
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