This compilation of 12 cases, most of which first appeared in the New Zealand Herald, is a follow-up of sorts to the author's 2015 The Scene of the Crime. The book developed during a time when Steve Braunias considered himself "missing".
"The usual failings," he writes, "plus old age, which for so long had felt like a rumour, was busy furnishing my life with intimations of mortality." He "was a lost soul" who "took a special interest in reporting" the stories of Socksay Chansy, Nigel Peterson, and Murray Mason. Braunias "almost felt envious. They had managed to disappear."
The book begins and ends with coverage of the trial of Grace Millane's killer. It's harrowing on a few levels, delving into bleak detail of what the courtroom demands of its witnesses, and of Grace herself, in order to conduct a fair trial. And of course, reading about Jesse Kempson's actions—"rightly described as depraved"— from Justice Simon Moore's summary. For some part of the narrative, there's no moving past Kempson until, finally, we're done and are left with what remains.
Murray Mason is a hard-drinking ex-Herald journalist who died after a lonely fall down a stream in the Auckland Domain. His friends remember him as a "fantastic joker". But when Braunias contacts Mason's daughter, Rachel Wise, she reveals another side, "an unrelenting story of trauma and unhappiness and grief". Mason was nasty in the worst of ways, his reign of terror ending only when he left the family. It's a superbly crafted piece on the unravelling of a life.
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