The runaway man of the title is a seemingly mild-mannered med student, Nick Greene, who disappears from campus one day with just a backpack.
The mystery in this Paeroa-based author’s debut thriller isn’t where he is – we meet him in the opening chapter creeping back from the surrounding bush to his family home to grab some supplies and enjoy a cooked breakfast – but why he has chosen to run away.
Rather tellingly, his family wait a week before pronouncing him missing, his mother insisting her son has been killed and that the police open a homicide investigation.
We learn of Greene’s dislike of his hometown but his affinity with its surrounding flora and fauna. We also learn he’s had a history of disappearances throughout his childhood.
He sees the outdoors as “a treasure map, a list of endless possibilities. Outside, away from the trimmed lawn and front stoop of suburbia, he felt like anything could happen.”
Glimpses into his unhappy family life and psychological makeup are deftly scattered through the novel – at one point, he deliberately runs into a wall and fractures his nose, another incident involves turning a gun on his father while out hunting.
Tasked with finding Greene is a jaded small-town detective, Abbott, who has had to live with the tragic outcome of a 90s missing-person case he was involved in.
Abbott is a loner and emotionally scarred. He has been in the same job for two decades, watched colleagues rise in the ranks above him and is a pessimist by nature, maintaining that things don’t work out – “Not for careers, not for families, and certainly not for marriages.”
Despite his pessimistic nature, he is dedicated to his police work and sinks his “teeth into the case like a carnivore ripping into a piece of meat, leaving no flesh on the bone”.
However, Greene’s case is put on the backburner until the body of a fisherman is discovered in the surrounding bush, along with evidence pointing to Greene’s presence. The investigation is then upgraded to a manhunt.
It’s a good set up, and there’s much to like about The Runaway Man: some lovely descriptions of the local bush – apparently inspired by the Thames Valley – and a fast-paced narrative.
However, Greene remains an opaque character throughout, and while there’s too much emphasis in crime fiction on writing characters readers warm to, some may find him a little too inscrutable.
The prose can also get a little giddy in places – and one can’t help but feel that the novel may have been improved by a more rigorous edit, which might also have looked at whether naming a character Happy is ever a good idea outside of kids’ fiction.
That said, the novel receives a welcome jolt of energy when we encounter a pair of fellow grifters at a dodgy motel. Marina is running from her own difficult past and makes a living selling stolen items to pawn shops. She and her boorish partner, Trev, are wonderfully knotty characters, straight out of noir central casting. And then there’s a great surprise twist.
The Runaway Man is the first of an intended series with UK-based Cranthorpe Millner publishers that, says Tantau, a Waikato journalist, will tell the stories of those who “seek new lives and those left behind in the old ones”.
