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![\"Carved](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/3472567_web1_Carved-in-Blood.jpg\")
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Carved in Blood<\/p>\n
Hana immediately fears something about the shooting just doesn\u2019t smell right. Too much evidence.<\/p>\n
Some murder mystery fan in your book club will self-aggrandizingly point out that, in such tales, the innocent bystander was often the target all along.<\/p>\n
But so much evidence points to that one suspect. So much evidence.<\/p>\n
Carved in Blood is the third superb Hana Westerman police procedural by New Zealand author Michael Bennett who, like Westerman, is Maori.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a whodunit, and indeed a terrific one, but Bennett\u2019s books are much more powerfully about race in New Zealand, about how Indigenous people and especially young men are incarcerated at a rate triple their share of the population, about how Indigenous people achieving in the white world face discrimination every day of their lives.<\/p>\n
Race does not stop at Indigenous people and descendants of British settlers. Bennett tells us that New Zealand has had significant immigration from Asia.<\/p>\n
Hana has a budding relationship with a private detective who\u2019s from Korea. His aunt tells Hana to back off; Koreans don\u2019t approve of divorced women, she says, and her brown skin traditionally means someone who works in the fields and is thus unworthy of their family. Don\u2019t be so subtle, auntie.<\/p>\n
Are Korean immigrants bigots? Some of them for sure, Bennett tells us.<\/p>\n
And while there are homegrown gangsters afoot, the primary villains in Carved in Blood come from China, so entrenched that New Zealand police have a unit just to investigate Asian gangs. The easiest way for international students to earn cash is to frequent casinos where they launder money for their Asian mobsters.<\/p>\n
There are subplots galore. Hana rescued a nephew from the clutches of a gang lord who\u2019s hanging about, recruiting impoverished kids into the trade \u2014 and the gang lord is into grudges. A police officer, who had his leg blown off, now wears a prosthetic as he trains for the arduous physical tests that could get him out from behind a desk \u2014 but that rage he shows occasionally, that couldn\u2019t possibly be triggered by steroids\u2026 surely not.<\/p>\n
\n\t\tWinnipeg Free Press | Newsletter\n\t<\/p>\n
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Jaya and Hana\u2019s daughter Addison is betrothed to her partner, Plus-One, whose race and gender never are never explored in much detail. The more Hana sleuths what happened to Jaye, the more threatened her family becomes.<\/p>\n
Hana\u2019s widowed father has fallen in love; Hana doesn\u2019t know how she feels about that, especially as her father shows a sign here and a memory lapse there of what could be the early stages of dementia.<\/p>\n
And Hana\u2019s boss is a Maori woman fighting her way up through the ranks after experiencing awful things in Afghanistan. Maybe even doing awful things in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
Michael Bennett books aren\u2019t easy. But oh my, they are good.<\/p>\n
Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin fondly remembers touring New Zealand 45 years ago with a coach-load of wild Aussies; he was among a handful of people on the ferry crossing between north and south islands who did not meet up with chug chunder (best not to Google).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Det.-INSP. Jaye Hamilton makes a brief liquor-store stop on the way home in Auckland to celebrate his daughter\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":106277,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[64,63,457,134],"class_list":["post-106276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-books","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106276\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}