BOOKS WITH NICKY PELLEGRINO
A SON TRIES TO SOLVE HIS MOTHER’S MURDER
This atmospheric, slow-burn crime mystery takes us inside an exclusive gated cul-de-sac, deep in the Titirangi bush, where it seems like everyone is hiding secrets.
Best-selling crime author Aarav Rai is living here, back in the family mansion with his arrogant businessman father and his subservient stepmother, while he recovers from smashing himself up in a horrific car crash.
Aarav is a mess, existing on a cocktail of pain medications and a diet of sugar, struggling with gaps in his memory and is mentally erratic. He has never got over the disappearance of his mother Nina, who took off a decade earlier, along with quarter of a million dollars. Aarav has always assumed she abandoned him but, as the story opens, her body is discovered, strapped in the passenger seat of a wrecked car hidden in the bush nearby.
So it seems like Nina was murdered.
It turns out that a lot of people in the cul-de-sac might have had a reason to dislike this beautiful, headstrong woman. Even Aarav’s relationship with her was fraught and crucially he doesn’t recall exactly what he did on the night of her disappearance. He loved her… but might he have hurt her?
Nalini Singh always produces great characters and with Aarav she has created someone troubled, not always likeable,
by Nalini Singh (Hachette, $34.99) but deep-down decent. He narrates the story and it is built entirely on the shifting sands of his unreliable memory, which makes things disorienting as he tries to piece together what happened to his mother.
The writing is lovely and there is a richness of descriptive detail, with New Zealand’s landscape playing a starring role and lending menace. It’s all very intriguing but for a thriller, not massively suspenseful.
The other niggles for me were that an over-population of characters complicates the central plot. And the medical elements seem a bit sketchy and are not always convincing. Still, if you like your mysteries to keep you guessing, this one will deliver.
I’d love to see the character of Aarav come back and star in another crime story. He seems full of possibility.