Blast from the past
If you see the list of contemporary NZ authors as a trade guild, then David McGill is one of its sturdiest artisans. He’s been head-down for decades, producing an equally sturdy succession of fiction, journalism, local history, Kiwiana, even lexicography, much of it through his Silver Owl Press. This is his sixth Dan Delaney thriller. DD is now old enough to wear an RSA golf shirt, and he snores a lot at night. With various family, he’s in 1980s Sydney this time, so there’s much decade detail, including clandestine meetings between PMs Hawke and Lange, Kiri Te K in lace gloves launching a Kiwi Sav Blanc at the Opera House, Anzus exercises, the USS Buchanan (remember?). Even flamboyant Carmen has a strut-on part.
The principal protagonist now is DS Maria Kikowski, once Maria Delaney, who starts off bound and blindfolded in a white room. Even before that, a longboard towing a limpet mine is paddled towards “the massive black slab” of a warship, and bullets thump into a body. You never feel short-changed in a McGill mystery.
Multiple family tensions bubble in the background, and sometimes the foreground. A cornucopia of characters, some more like caricatures, spills forth. A funeral is violently invaded; a bunch of marines invade a hospital ward; heavies in black T-shirts snarl past. The clergy play a prominent part, while our PM handles physical coercion better than his Aussie counterpart.
It’s all related in the author’s characteristically clear, brisk prose, which seems to have become a touch more adjectival than usual. Characters exchange inventive insults and wisecracks; a couple of them offer set speeches.
A different place and time, but much the same mix as previous Delaney adventures. Much the same satisfaction as well.
More generations and misadventures stretch ahead. l