Location, Location, Location

 Sara Johnson, 1st Sunday

The real estate mantra – location, location, location – applies to mystery fiction, too. Readers often choose a book because its setting sparks their curiosity and reading or listening to it transports them to a world of distinct flora and fauna, voices and cultures, moods and – I am discussing mysteries – shattered peace.

I gabbed with Malcolm Kempt at CrimeScene Bookfest in Pittsboro, NC. Michael’s debut book, A Gift Before Dying, is set in Nunavut, which forms most of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. The only way to get around is by boat or plane. “The territory has the highest murder rate of anywhere in Canada,” Michael told me. He spent 17 years a criminal lawyer in the region, flying to tiny villages to represent clients, so he knows what he is talking about. Of course I bought the book!

The Canadian Arctic is foreign to me, but I know another rugged landscape: Stewart Island, New Zealand, separated from the tip of the South Island by the often treacherous Foveaux Strait. Like Michael's Nunavut, you must arrive by plane or boat. It is the setting of my second Alexa Glock Forensic Mystery, The Bones Remember.

Stewart Island is roughly 45 by 25 miles, yet there are only 14 miles of paved road. (Sometimes the road is blocked by sea lions.) There is one fishing village, one pub, one six-hole golf course, and one police officer for the 400 locals who call it home. The rest of the island is Rakiura National Park, a dense primeval thicket that attracts hunters (for white-tailed deer, imported from the U.S. in 1905) and hikers. It is a landscape that can disorient and kill.

When we lived in Christchurch, we planned a trip to Stewart Island. My husband asked if I’d like to go shark cage diving during our visit.

I did not know the waters around Stewart Island are a great white shark hot spot. Many Stewart Islanders make their living in or on the sea and have coexisted peacefully with the sharks. Two shark cage operations opened up in 2007-2008 and in the years that followed, that peace was threatened. The locals believed luring the sharks with fish parts and blood was changing their behavior, making the whites a threat to their lives and livelihood. The sharks were coming close to shore and following boats. Residents wanted to ban the cages. This inherent tension between ‘local and other’ is the spine of The Bones Remember.

I found a reason to send Alexa there from the following 2016 newspaper article:

Otago Daily Times: Joe Freiman, a 64-year-old farmer, went missing during a hunting trip on Stewart Island in 1991 and was never found. Search and Rescue will today return to the area to resume the hunt. About 70 police and volunteers from the Southern District will make use of the new SARTrack system as they search the area on foot. "The search area is probably one of the most remote parts of New Zealand so it will be difficult for police to provide good communications," Community Constable Dale Jenkins said.

The search was unsuccessful.

Alexa enters those woods when the skeletal remains of a fictional hunter is discovered. After being charged by a sea lion on the beach – she thought she would be steamrolled – Alexa wedges between clawing branches and enters the forest primeval. She is instantly attacked by another enemy: sandflies. (I was rough on her.)

When a shark-ravaged body washes ashore elsewhere on the island, Alexa is whisked out of the woods to examine the remains and use teeth marks – Alexa’s specialty is teeth – to identify the culprit so the shark can be hunted down like in Jaws. Surprise: it wasn’t a shark that killed the victim.

In its recorded history, there has only been one murder on Stewart Island. Eighty-two year old André Jose was bludgeoned to death with a manuka branch in 1927. I felt like it was time for another.

One scene in The Bones Remember still gives me nightmares. Alexa, snooping aboard a moored shark-cage diving boat, is attacked by a gaff-wielding assailant. To save herself she jumps overboard. It is night. The cold waters of Horseshoe Bay are inky black. Suddenly a whoosh of warmth, of slick oil, of putrid rot, coats her head, blinding her. Alexa was chummed. I get shivers rereading the passage.

When Alexa dog paddles into a bed of thick rubbery kelp, she thinks she’s safe from the sharks. Later she finds out from a budding scientist studying kelp that researchers in South Africa attached cameras to the dorsal fins of eight Carcharodon carcharias. Seven swam into the kelp forests.

Gulp.

I like a smidgen of romance in my series. What better place for Alexa and Detective Inspector Bruce Horne – a continuing character in the series – to have their first kiss than under a starry sky? “I’ve never seen so many stars,” Alexa says in the book. “It’s like a glowworm cave.” Due to its remote location and sparse population, Stewart Island is virtually free of light pollution and is designated a Dark Sky Sanctuary. That darkness also ramps up tension.

William Kent Krueger – whose Cork O’Connor mysteries are set in the great Northwoods of Minnesota, said, “Stories rise out of and are inexorably shaped by the unique elements of the place in which they occur.” Stewart Island teems with sharks – yes – but also teems with those unique elements which make for a great read: geographic isolation, darkness, dorsal fins, and treachery.

Where have you traveled in recent books? By the way, when my husband found out how much it cost to go shark cage diving, we went birding instead. 

Sara Johnson, 1st Sunday