New Zealand, a Few Fun Facts and an Idea

LUCY BURDETTE: Kia Ora! As you’ve no doubt heard by now, I’m just back from a two-week trip to New Zealand. I’m certain you don’t want the full slideshow but I’ll share a few reactions from our whirlwind voyage.

1. New Zealanders are crazy in the sense of tackling physical challenges. Probably because the landscape lends itself to challenge? For example, we heard stories of men hunting deer from a helicopter with no doors. There is a road race along the length of the Milford track every year, 33 1/2 miles of mountainous terrain. It sells out in 22 seconds and has a long waiting list. We did a four hour hike at the end of the trail, which was plenty for me!

2. New Zealand is an island—the closest land point from another country about 1000 miles away. They are very protective of their land and creatures. The country has no natural mammals, other than two bats, which means no predators. That means many of the birds native to New Zealand evolved into land birds without the ability to fly. When people arrived on ships from other countries, they brought with them pests such as stoats, rats, and cats. Also, the Maori people hunted the larger land birds, often to extinction. All this means New Zealanders are very focused on conservation, sustainability, and increasing the population of native species, from birds to people.

3. New Zealand was the last major land mass to be settled. The Maori tribe arrived after 1300, and the British declared sovereignty in the 1840’s. Since the 1970’s, the Maori and other ethnic groups have pushed to take land and power back, which they consider stolen by the British. Maori is a second language for the country—our guide was pleased to tell us that former prime minister Jacinta Arden began her messages to parliament and the people in the Maori language.

Circling back to the question discussed on Monday, I did not do a lot of work on vacation. But as a long-time mystery writer, it’s hard not to think about murder and mayhem in a new setting! The people in our travel group were game to point out poisonous plants and murder methods that I might enjoy using as we toured. If I was going to write a story, I thought I might have opened it in the dark sky night reserve. After a chance to view the southern hemisphere constellations, we herded into the changing areas and given white robes before heading to a warm pool. (Keep in mind that this all happened in darkness so our eyes could acclimate.) We floated in that pool on individual hammocks listening to a guide tell stories about the stars. I could imagine most of the guests exiting the pool, but leaving one behind—quite dead. It would have been too dark to see much of anything, a detecting challenge!

But then, on our last day hike on the Routeburn track, I began to chat with one of our guides, Olivia, who turned out to be a wonderful story brainstormer. She was fascinated with the idea of setting a mystery in New Zealand. She suggested either the Lake Marion or Gertrude Saddle routes, which are very popular  with Instagram influencers. Supposing there was a couple hiking together, each of them with an active account. Supposing their tracking device was lost or malfunctioned, and one or both disappeared on the trail. A professional guide, like Olivia, might have been one of the last people to have seen them on the trail. What might she have noticed? If someone did meet an unsavory end, was it a push and a fall? 

Or perhaps a dish prepared with New Zealand’s most poisonous plant, the tutu with its delicious looking berries? 

Or the stinging nettle, the ongoanga?

Who knows if I’ll use any of this, but what fun to think about it. Honestly, it helped pass the time when I was trudging up a steep and rocky path. Fortunately, there was an incredible view at the top. I’m sure that that’s a good metaphor for writing as well. (Here's one version of trouble I forgot--the Waiotapu hot springs and bubbling mud pools...)

Do you think about murder mysteries when you travel? What's the most exotic setting you've enjoyed in a mystery?

PS, If you'd like to hear more about the itinerary we took without the murderous commentary, here's John's version...

People Disappear in New Zealand

HANK: Yay! The theme continues—and it proves you don’t have to budge from your comfy chair. The Reds will take you to places you’ve never been. Prague? Sure. Underground Oklahoma City? No prob. And today?  Meet the brave and plucky Sara Johnson, the debut mystery author who, when love and curiosity called, picked up packed up and went—well, would you have done the same thing?

A Great Adventure

by Sara E. Johnson

     People ask how I got the idea to write the Alexa Glock mysteries set in New Zealand. It started when my husband proposed living in Aotearoa, “the land of the long white cloud,” for a year. Could we do it? I left my teaching job as a reading specialist at a Chapel Hill, North Carolina middle school, three children (the youngest was a college sophomore), and cat, to find out.

((Ed. note via Wiki : Aotearoa; commonly pronounced by English speakers as /ˌaʊtɛəˈroʊ.ə/   is the Māori name for New Zealand. It was originally used by the Māori people in reference to only the North Island but, since the late 19th century, the word has come to refer to the country as a whole. Several meanings have been proposed for the name; the most popular meaning usually given is "long white cloud", or variations thereof. This refers to the cloud formations which helped early Polynesian navigators find the country.  Now to our regular programming. 

(Map from Gringer - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11342313 )

     

My first glimpse of the Southern Alps from an airplane left me chilled: jagged rows of snow-capped peaks raked the spine of the South Island not far from where we rented a house in Christchurch. The Canterbury area welcomed us with a three day “active front” which blew cars off the road and two trees down in our back “garden.” I loved the newspaper headline describing gusts of more than 222 kmh: “By Crikey it was windy.”

     A headline during our first week also caused me chills: “Chance of finding tourists alive very remote.” A Canadian couple driving a camper van disappeared while crossing Haast Pass. We planned to cross the same pass, one of three that bisect the Alps. We followed the story closely. It played out like this: first the wheels and chassis of the van were discovered 80 meters down a gorge in the Haast River. Most likely a rock slide from the same storm that welcomed us to this rugged country swept their van off the road. The next week the young woman's body was found on a downriver stretch of beach. The man's thigh bone was discovered three years later.

     People disappear in New Zealand.

     An early adventure was to the tip of the North Island, Cape Reinga, where the Maori believe the soul departs. It's a wild and spiritual place, and we could watch the Tasman Sea crash into the Pacific Ocean. Nearby, the Te Peki sand dunes rise 140 meters above the sea and attract attention. I joined a line of twenty-somethings trudging up the dunes in gale winds, my boogie board trying to escape, or carry me aloft, my bare feet sinking into the fine sand, so I could ”depart” from the crest.

     A body could disappear in this sand, I thought, and the idea for a mystery series crystallized.

     Thermal activity abounds on the North Island. The Rotorua area has the highest concentration of geysers, boiling springs, sinter terraces, sulphur pools, and mud pots in the world, and I was hot to visit. Skull and crossbone signs warned us, but even so, my husband dipped a finger into a steaming stream. “Get back,” I yelled, like a good wife. The year before, a boy slipped off the path and into one of the pools. Headline: Boy dies after being boiled alive in NZ thermal spring.

At the thermal mud pots I oohed at the bubbling stinking Hades, and knew I had to kill someone there. Molten Mud Murder takes place at those mud pots. My protagonist, Alexa Glock, must identify the remains through dental X-rays. Everything else boiled away.

     Foveaux Strait, separating the South Island and Stewart Island, is notoriously rough. The Maori call the wind whipping the strait hau-mate, or death wind. The year before we made the crossing, a rogue wave capsized a fishing boat, killing eight men. Tourists, like my husband and me, visit Stewart Island for many reasons: hiking (yes), birding (yes), hunting (no) and shark cage diving (NO). There are at least 44 tagged great white sharks in the area. They like to visit, too, and certainly could be blamed for a ravaged body washing ashore.

     That happens in the second Alexa Glock mystery, Chum (coming September, 2020). Was the shark really the culprit?

     My husband and I hiked the 33-mile Milford Track, “the finest walk in the world,” in sunshine. We could actually see the glacial streams, alpine passes, gushing waterfalls, sheer cliffs, and not fall off swing bridges. This is unusual. The area gets 268 inches of rain each year. One hiker blogged about being airlifted out halfway through, after 15 inches submerged the track. Shortly after we completed Milford, a hiker, right in front of her partner, was swept away in a swollen creek.

     But what if the partner gave a little shove? In book three, Alexa hikes the Milford Track. As she clutches the flimsy rail of a swinging bridge, she spots a body in the river below.

     We reached the Cape Kidnappers gannet colony on a trailer pulled by a 1949 Minneapolis-Moline tractor. The old tractor pulled us between the breaking waves and spectacular cliff formations. I was shocked to spot a golf course atop one cliff. Our tractor driver told us a rich American bought the land, built a house and golf course. Many Silicon Valley hedge fund managers have also bought New Zealand property, perhaps as doomsday escape hatches. New Zealand has since banned foreigners from buying homes. But this man already had, and what if his neighbors didn't like it? The clamor of thousands of gannets protecting their chicks would eclipse a scream for help.

     Book four, I think.

     There are countless ways this brutal landscape can swallow a body, and thus makes a perfect setting for the Alexa Glock mysteries. The cat is on my lap as I peck away back home in North Carolina.

HANK: Told you! Adventure! Anyone been to New Zealand? Do you want to? Did you know it was called Aotearoa?

MOLTEN MUD MURDER

When a body is found half-submerged in a Waiariki Thermal Land of Enchantment molten mud pot, forensics expert Alexa Glock, her specialty odontology, spots a way to prolong her stay in New Zealand. Her fellowship has ended and no one is waiting for her to return to the States. Men have never been her expertise, but teeth are. Other ways of identifying the body may have… melted away.

A determined Alexa barrels her way onto the scene and into the lives of Rotorua’s finest, especially Detective Inspector Bruce Horne. There’s something about his glacial blue eyes that gets under never-married Alexa’s skin, even though she’s sworn off men.

Danger lurks in “the land of the long white cloud.” The murder victim, a city councilman, had trespassed on a sacred island forbidden to Pakeha, or non-Maori, and Alexa must follow suit. The Maori community is incensed that the rules of tapu have been disregarded and the consequences are disaster, demonic possession, or death.

Say what?

Alexa doesn’t believe in these three D’s, but when she discovers an unorthodox death threat in her rented riverside Trout Cottage, she reconsiders. A second murder heats the case to the boiling point and reveals a molten mix of motives and suspects. At the heart of Molten Mud Murder is an age old debate: is the past better left undisturbed, or unearthed? And at what cost either way?

Sara E. Johnson’s debut novel, the start of a series based in New Zealand, presents a page-turning story of facing the past and cracking the door open to an unexpected future. Sara E. Johnson is a mystery writer who spent nine months exploring wondrous New Zealand. Everywhere she snooped, there was a mystery that needed writing. Molten Mud Murder, Sara’s debut novel, will be published September, 2019 by Poisoned Pen Press/Sourcebooks. It is the first in the Alexa Glock Mystery series set in New Zealand.

Sara has a BA in Journalism and an MA in Education from the University of North Carolina.

Sara lives in Durham, North Carolina with her husband and golden doodle. She is a part-time educator and full time snooper. She is the current president of Triangle Sisters-in-Crime and a member of the North Carolina Writers’ Network.

My Special Place

RHYS BOWEN: I'm sure you've all found the past weeks as stressful as I have: spiteful, hateful political ads, voter fraud and intimidation, then the shooting in Thousand Oaks, a community that seems like the epitome of the American dream--elegant homes amid rolling hills, and those same hills being devastated by fire.

If I didn't have children and grandchildren in this country I'd seriously be thinking about moving somewhere else . The question would be where could I go? And would I want to uproot at this stage of my life? So what I have been doing is creating a fantasy escape in my mind.

I'm picturing that little English village (just like the ones Debs is now visiting). There are thatched cottages and an old stone church with a tower where bells ring every Sunday. There is a pub,  where there is a welcoming fire in winter and everybody knows everyone else.

There are flowers in gardens and horses and cows in fields and a village green where there is a cricket match every Sunday all summer. And I'd come out of my cottage, with roses climbing around the front door, put my basket on my arm and walk into the village to buy fresh bread at the baker's. And chat to other people along the way.

Doesn't that sound delightfully perfect? 

In moments of severe stress I also have another picture in my mind: a walk I did up to the Matterhorn in Switzerland. It is May and I'm walking through a carpet of flowers. The air is fresh and scented. There is the gentle sound of bells around the necks of cows in the meadow. I pass a little hut, come around the bend in the path and there is the mountain ahead of me, gleaming unbelievably white. And I just stand and stare and breathe.  I recall that image now when I need to breathe and be calm.

How about you? Do you have a place to escape to in your mind?

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Rhys, it sounds like a Mary Pilcher novel! I love her books, which have people experiencing genteel tragedy and triumph in the most luscious domestic settings possible. I can't remember the plots, but i can still recall the description of the "fragrant David Austin roses gathered in a shining silver bowl." The bowl was on a table well-polished with beeswax, natch.

I love your country destination, but after decades of Maine winters, my fantasy location is somewhere warmer.  If I had my druthers, I'd head for New Zealand. Beautiful landscape of mountains and seas, friendly English speaking people, rich history and culture dating back thousands of years, and it's home to a liberal Anglican church. Plus that adorable accent! I swear any man sounds sexier when speaking in a Aussie or Kiwi voice.

HALLIE EPHRON: In moments of stress, I "take a walk" in the neighborhood I grew up in, go 'shopping' in the department store I could walk to, imagine floating in the ocean at one of the beautiful (hopefully still) beaches new San Juan in Puerto Rico. I also look at photo albums -- images of my children and grandchildren are enormously comforting. And I'm not going anywhere... I plan to be here to vote in 2020.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Julia, there's a description of fragrant, climbing David Austin roses in the opening chapter of my new book! Maybe I need to add the beeswax...

Hallie, I look at photos of my granddaughter, too. And of my dogs and cats and my garden. Having just been to some of Rhys's idyllic English villages, I definitely see the appeal in that, and will probably spend a good bit of the next few months re-imagining my time there. I think about the Scottish Highlands, too. But my biggest stress-relieving fantasy place is almost always London. I know that seems a little contradictory, this huge, bustling city that certainly has its own share of problems, but I think I am never happier than when I'm just walking in London, and that's a nice thing to hold on to.

LUCY BURDETTE: And add the horrific California fires to the list of our stressors! After looking at your photos of the Cotswolds, that place sure appeals to me Debs. And I love Paris the way you love London. But just taking a walk through the back streets of Key West helps, as does walking along the beach in Connecticut. I lost my best stress relievers this year--Tonka and Yoda. We are sorting out whether to get a replacement, and if so, what. King George (Jenn's little rescue kitten) is a very good role model.

And ps, tempting as it might be to move, I'm here for the long run too!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Moving. Hm. You know? No. In moments of stress--which is like, always--okay, well let's put it this way. When I need to relax, I think about the pelicans on Nevis. We sit on the beach white white sand, not a person for miles. And the pelicans one two, three at a time, skim over the water, incredibly close, in two inches it seems, they'd hit. And they're fast. And then in an instant they go really high, then plummet into the water. Boom. And two seconds later, come up with a fish, gap it, then float on the surface. And every time they shimmy their little tail feathers. I could watch that for hours, and I can see it, vividly,  in my imagination. It calms me every time.  I'm seeing a lot of pelicans these days.

JENN McKINLAY: In times of stress, I go to the cosmos. I know, I'm a weirdo. When the Hooligans were little, we took them to the San Diego Space and Air Museum. They were having a special extraterrestrial exhibit - so fun with 8 and 9 yr old boys - and I bought a coffee table book of photographs from the Hubble Telescope. Whenever I am stressed by the world of humans, I look to the stars in that book. They are so bright and beautiful and a bajillion years old. I am fascinated while being reminded that human beings really aren't much more than cosmic dust, here for fleeting moments in the universe, and while it's important to live your best life, the things that we consider problems or tragedies aren't even a blip to the ever expanding cosmos surrounding us. I find great comfort in that.

RHYS: We have to confess that when Jenn started mentioning the cosmos we thought it was the drink (Cosmopolitans, you know?). And we all agreed they are quite good stress-relievers too!.

I think I'm lucky in that I find the Arizona desert is a great stress-buster, and also the walk we always take by the creek in California is pretty special too.


How about you, dear friends. How do you find peace in your hearts in stressful times?