Elspeth Sandys: A Passing Guest

By MARGIE THOMPSON

This emotional detective story is shaped around a mysterious death and a bit of crime. New Zealand-born novelist Renate meets Greg, a hotshot New Zealand lawyer who is in London on business.

She should have known better than to get involved with someone who displays an unsettling amount of neediness and manipulation, declaring his love for her on their first evening together, and sulking when she wants to adopt a more measured pace for their relationship.

But Sandys is good at emotional truth and she doesn't flinch from portraying human weaknesses in her characters - in this case Renate's naivety. Renate agrees to come back to New Zealand and move into the house in which Greg has lived already with several other wives.

Renate goes to Paremoremo to help an inmate, Max, who wants to learn to write creatively, and falls under his spell. They form a strong bond, the nature of which is part of the book's central exploration. Max dies, and the circumstances of his death are murky.

Unpeeling this relationship is the book's main purpose, but it can't quite bear such weight convincingly. It was the hardest to understand of all Renate's relationships, and the one with the greatest sense of not having been quite what it seemed.

As a valiant exploration of some of New Zealand's most pressing issues, Sandys is to be congratulated for this cogent attempt to get under our skins. She moves with seeming ease between the Pakeha and Maori worlds and her open-mindedness informs with great clarity on the texture of her characters' lives, their beliefs and world views, certainties and uncertainties.

The book's cover is misleading, implying a tepid romance, but there is actually a real complexity here. It works hard on a range of difficult issues, from political to literary, to moral and ethical matters, such as the nature of evil, the matter of choice, the difficulties inherent in "us and them", and how our daily acts of greed and selfishness differ from real criminality.

Sandys is a highly skilled writer and an accurate observer of life. Both compelling and thought-provoking, there is great emotional truth here.

HarperCollins $24.95

* Margie Thomson is the Herald books editor.