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.

Two Mystery Icons: Nancy and LInda

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Quick, tell me a character in a book who changed your life as a kid.  Meg in Wrinkle in Time, you say? Anne of Green Gables? Laura in Little House?   Beth or Meg or Jo or Amy?

Please. 

For many of us, there’s one character who still resonates. Say her name in a room of readers, and there’s always a rumble of admiration and agreement.

I know you can guess. But you don’t need to. Because we share the iconic young woman with a woman who’s become an icon herself.  Look who's here!  The amazing Linda Fairstein.                       

 Nancy’s Legacy

By Linda Fairstein

I would imagine that every one of my friends among the Jungle Red Writers had some childhood fictional characters with whom they identified, who drew them into the wonderful world of storytelling that keeps each of us at the keyboard today.

My earliest memories of books were the ones my mother read to me every night before I went to sleep, and then a bit later, those I found on our weekly trip to the public library each Saturday to pick out three new adventures.

One of my strongest attachments was to a smart young teenager – how sophisticated and mature she seemed to me as a kid! – named Nancy Drew.  She had a keen sense of justice, devoted loyalty to her friends, and an ability to right all the wrongs in the town of River Heights.  The Nancy Drew Mysteries were a series of books, and represented the first time I became hooked on a continuing character, whose return I anticipated with great delight and enthusiasm.  I collected those novels religiously – they were sure-fire presents for my birthday, Christmas, and the difficult days when I was homebound with measles or mumps.

Each mystery filled me with the same desire.  I’d look at the jacket art, hold the book in my hands, dream about actually crawling into the story somehow and becoming one of Nancy’s posse of crime-solvers.  If she and Bess and George were going to learn what the secret in the old clock was, I wanted to be there with them.  If there was room beside Ned Nickerson in the blue roadster, then that was the ride that I wanted to take.

I was very close to my mother, who died at the age of 88, eight years ago.  Among her papers, we found that she had saved something I had written in the 5^th grade – my very first crime story, The Secret of Apple Gate Farm.  When I reread that paper, which had been dedicated to my favorite librarian, it re-ignited my desire to create something for kids of the same age.

 Nancy Drew was my inspiration for writing a series of crime novels for adults, featuring a strong protagonist in a non-traditional role for a woman.  When I started my Alexandra Cooper books in 1996, the prosecutorial leadership role was far more uncommon than it is today, which marks a really great advance in the practice of law.

But I couldn’t get the idea of writing for kids out of my head, and Nancy Drew is also the reason for this series and its first entry, INTO THE LION’S DEN.  I wanted to create stories for the young girls and boys in my life that might appeal to them just as my childhood heroine ‘spoke’ to me.  I have no desire to compete with the great women who wrote as ‘Carolyn Keene’, but I do want to bring some modern forensic advances into a series for middle-grade readers, along with old-fashioned storytelling.

I’d given a lot of thought to my 12 year old sleuth, Devlin Quick, before I set out to tell her first tale.  Like Nancy, I instilled in her a great desire to see justice done, and wanted her to have a terrific relationship with her closest friends – Booker, Liza and Katie.  She’s very much a New York City kid, with a good sense of humor, a great love of books, and just a bit of an edge.  Best of all, she is the daughter of a very strong single mother, who also happens to be the first woman police commissioner of New York City – a job I very much wanted to have in the late 1980’s.

I’ve had such a good time bringing Devlin Quick and her friends to life, and I look forward to engaging with readers of all ages who might want to run along with her, just as I wanted to do with my beloved friend, Nancy Drew.

HANK: Oh, Linda, I can completely imagine you as the first woman police commissioner! (And more I will not say.)

Will there be more Devlins? Are you coming to Boston? 

And, hurray! SO excited about this:

The amazing Linda is giving away TWO copies of Into The Lion’s Den to very lucky commenters today!

Just tell us…what did you want to be when you “grew up”?  Something traditional? Or non?

(I had a brief cowboy fling, and wore my cowboy hat EVERY day, to my mom’s chagrin. And for a while, at age 13 or so, I wanted to be a disc jockey. And then a geneticist. But before that? Yeah, Nancy Drew.)

How about you?

****************

LINDA FAIRSTEIN was chief of the Sex Crimes Unit of the district attorney's office in Manhattan for more than two decades and is America's foremost legal expert on sexual assault and domestic violence. Her Alexandra Cooper novels are international bestsellers and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. She lives in Manhattan and on Martha's Vineyard.