By Crikey It Was Windy - Sara Johnson

 This is the first time we’ve had two new members arrive at Murder Is Everywhere in one week! Sara Johnson, author of the Alexa Glock forensics mysteries set in New Zealand, joins us today as a regular contributor posting on the first Sunday of each month.

Sara lives in North Carolina, but a nine month visit to New Zealand left her with multiple ideas for plots of murders and their forensic solutions. Alexa is a forensics investigator and also from the US like her creator, but a long-time resident in New Zealand with an on-again off-again relationship with a local police officer in Auckland. She’s very smart, and forensics is only part of the formidable range of skills she brings to solving mysteries.

Two things stand out right away when you read Sara’s novels – her knowledge of, and careful research into, forensics, and her passion for New Zealand with its varied people and amazing settings.

So a big welcome to Murder Is Everywhere, Sara! We’re greatly looking forward to learning more about New Zealand and forensics (among other things) from your posts.

Over to you!

Michael

 

Thank you for the lovely introduction, Michael, and hello to MIE readers. I am thrilled to join my fellow global bloggers. I have long been a Murder is Everywhere admirer and I look forward to sharing my New Zealand adventures and research, and sometimes about my life in Durham, NC.  (No, I don’t pull for Duke!)

 

My 6th Alexa Glock forensic mystery comes out this month. Alexa gets into all sorts of trouble on a Mount Aspiring glacier, but that’s for another post.

 As Michael pointed out, I am not a Kiwi. So why set my books in New Zealand? Well, back in 2012, my husband Forrest retired. Too early, I thought, as I drove each day to work as a reading specialist at a local middle school, growling. He caught on quickly and dangled a carrot in front of me.

“How would you like to take a year off teaching and live in New Zealand?”

 Sputter, sputter. Impossible.

 But we rented out our house through SabbiticalHomes.com, rented a house in Christchurch that came with a Russian blue cat named Iris, and threw an antipodean bash before we left. Our biggest mistake was not insisting our cat Pattie came with our house. She was unhappy in her foster home. 

On the final leg of the long journey from North Carolina to NZ,  I looked out the plane window. The jagged spine of the Southern Alps on the South Island made me shiver. Jeez. Someone could disappear in there.

 We arrived in September, spring in the Southern Hemisphere, and it was cold and rainy. The little house was frigid and the box by the wood stove was empty. The trip to buy wood, in slanting rain and rush hour traffic, was harrowing. (Every time my husband used the turn signal, he turned off the windshield wipers instead.)

 That night a gale bashed the South Island. The patio furniture flew away and two trees came down in our new backyard.  The newspaper headline summed it up nicely: By Crikey It Was Windy.

 The next morning, September 18, 2013, the headline didn’t make us giggle: Chance of finding tourists alive ‘very remote.’

A young Canadian couple, Connor Hayes and Joanna Lam, had rented a camper van and were traveling through a mountain pass during the same storm that downed our trees. The chassis of their camper van was discovered draped over a boulder in a Haast River gorge. Authorities believed their van was swept off the road by a landslip. 

A week later, Joanna’s body was found six kilometers downstream. Connor’s body, despite massive searches, was not recovered during the nine months we stayed in New Zealand. (That’s how long a tourist visa is good for, and not a day longer. We tried.)

 The fate of this young couple imprinted on my mind and was the seedling for my Alexa Glock forensic mysteries, in which fictional people disappear, sometimes because they are murdered, and Alexa uses their teeth or bones to identify them.

Three years later, back home with Pattie on my lap, I learned a segment of Connor Hayes’s femur was discovered five kilometers from where the van was swept into the river. New searches uncovered more of his bones. The remains helped Connor’s parents and five siblings accept their beloved son and brother was truly dead.

 See you next month, new friends -

Sara Johnson, 1st Sundays