KIWI NOIR – WHEN THE DEEP DARK BUSH SWALLOWS YOU WHOLE By GEOFF PARKES
There has been a dazzling array of good debut crime fiction coming out of New Zealand over the past couple of years. Michael Bennett, Gavin Strawhan, Gareth and Louise Ward, and Rose Carlyle, have all produced very impressive first novels and now we have Melbourne based Geoff Parkes to add to that list.
Parkes’ When The Deep Dark Bush Swallows You Whole, (Penguin, 4 February 2025), has possibly the longest title you will see this year, but despite that is a very good debut.
Like most recent crime novels, When The Deep Dark Bush Swallows You Whole has a dual timeline.
The book opens in January 1983. Ryan Bradley has returned, for the university holiday break, to his remote hometown of Nashville in New Zealand’s rugged King Country. It is a bittersweet trip. He has returned to earn some money as a wool presser, but also to sell his late mother’s house. He is also feeling on the outer, with old friends no longer treating him the same since he has gone to university. More significantly, he is haunted by memories of Sanna Sovernen, a Finnish backpacker and his secret lover, who worked with him in the shearing shed the previous summer, before disappearing without a trace.
Things are further complicated when Sanna’s sister, Emilia, arrives from Finland, determined to get answers about her sister, and the other missing female travelers in the area.
After a brief introduction, the story moves back to November 1981 and the reader becomes witness to the events that led up to Sanna’s disappearance. There are relatively brief returns to 1983, but most of the action occurs in the earlier timeline, as Ryan’s world begins to collapse around him.
This is a very evocative and thoughtfully plotted book. The depiction of rural New Zealand in the early 1980s is masterfully done, and the characters, both major and minor, quickly spring to life. Parkes is good at capturing the details of wool pressing and the local community, and there is a vivid sense of place. The characters are well grounded in the community, but none of them are particularly engaging, apart from Emilia. Ryan is nicely fleshed out, and the tension between him and his old friends is well described, but his emotional miasma becomes a little tiring.
The dual timeline does allow Parkes to inject some suspense through the foreshadowing of Sanna’s disappearance, and the story generally unfolds smoothly. There are some slow patches, but the pacing is mainly good, and Parkes delivers the required shocks and surprises towards the end, as well as a very tense conclusion in 1983. I thought that the balance between the dual timelines could have been better, but overall this is a very fine debut novel with lots of depth and emotion. Recommended.
When The Deep Dark Bush Swallows You Whole was released in Australia on 4 February 2025. Overseas release dates are not clear at this stage.