Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
The South Island of New Zealand is reputedly a land of mountains and fiords: scenic, dramatic, alluring. A novel set on a savage coast smothered with forests of tree ferns suggests a different country: claustrophobic and sinister. There are no landmarks in this forest, no animals, no mobile signal, and the under-storey is so dense that hikers straying from the trail may disappear as if they’d walked into a fourth dimension.
In Singh’s book this is what happened eight years ago when, over a short period, three young women, each hiking solo, vanished. They were unknown to each other, had nothing in common other than their youth and the fact that they were travelling alone. In the remote fishing community of Golden Cove rumours were squashed, people quick to cite the twin dangers of the green jungle inland, and the crumbling cliffs above the sea; no one, at least in public, pointed out that, where two might be coincidence, three such accidents gave pause for thought.
Eight years later, on the other side of the world a celebrated concert pianist, Anahera: Maori born, buries her cheating husband in London, is confronted by his pregnant mistress, and flies home to the family cabin in Golden Cove to lick her wounds. Straight away she meets the town’s one cop (with his own haunting past), and the most ravishing girl: the kind that has all the locals from sixteen to sixty in thrall.
Miriama is also Maori; in this town people and relationships are well mixed: European, Asian, native and colonial New Zealanders, some professionally successful, others striving. Miriama is about to take up a scholarship in photography. Basking in her own achievement, in the passionate devotion of the local doctor, loved by everyone, Miri appears to have the world at her feet when, without warning, she disappears.
In the protracted search that follows Anahera, the angry widow, and Will, the cop who carries a load of guilt, fall in love, meanwhile exposing the hidden secrets of the townsfolk, secrets which, in this febrile climate, are monopolized by sex. And now, after nearly a decade, Will, a stranger on the scene, and Anahera the cosmopolitan, introduce an objectivity that signals a new and unexpected danger. They start to consider a link between Miri’s disappearance and the fate of the three girls who vanished eight years ago.
This is an old story: disappearance, investigation, explanation and resolution. Originality should lie in the primeval setting and an ethnic mix of characters but both environment and people come over flat and colourless; the reader is virtually overwhelmed by the incessant rain and in reality by too many words.
