Review: When the Deep, Dark Bush Swallows You Whole by Geoff Parkes

Geoff Parkes, now resident in Melbourne, is best known as a sportswriter - he pens a weekly opinion column for the popular Roar website and has published two books on rugby. It seems, though, that he's always harboured ambitions to write fiction and this, his first crime novel - which he describes in the afterword as 'a long time in the making' - was worth the wait. Set in the King Country in the 1980s, it is not only a well written, compelling rural murder mystery, but a wonderfully detailed glimpse into Kiwi small town life of the time.

The novel opens with the arrival of a determined Finnish woman to the small King Country town of Nashville, a year after her sister, Sanna, was last seen, late one night, in the pub’s car park. 

The first thing she does is go to the police station to confront the man in charge of the investigation - one that has been put on the back burner after extensive inquiries and a media onslaught have led nowhere. The story of the pretty Finnish tourist gone missing has clear parallels to a real life, and still controversial 1989 case, involving a Swedish couple killed in the bush in the Coromandel.

Similarly, King Country - with its areas of dense and rugged bush - offers anyone wanting to hide a body ample choice.

As a detective says at one point - “If someone wants to hide a girl in the bush, this is the perfect place to do it.”

We soon learn there have been a slew of such disappearances - one in the area and others further afield. All are unsolved - which leads some to suggest that a serial killer is on the loose.

Parkes then takes readers back thirteen months for much of the remainder of the book. We meet Sanna who is here on a working holiday on a shearing gang. She soon begins a relationship with a fellow worker Ryan, a law student, who is back home to attend to affairs after his mother’s death.

The story is told through rotating chapters, each of which focus on the perspective of a single character. Parkes is particularly good at depicting the free-wheeling, no-nonsense Sanna, who gives as good as she gets, is sexually confident and won’t be pushed around.

It wasn’t a surprise to learn that the author grew up in the King Country - and even worked on a shearing gang much like the one depicted. A highlight of the book is his skill in capturing the daily life of the time; public bar jukeboxes playing Bob Marley’s One Love, Mark II Cortina’s, the inevitable pub meat raffle; a time, he reminds us, when men could be heard to say things like - “Here, get some of this piss into you!” and drive home “carefully” drunk.

Parkes presents a whole, living community, including hairdressers, Maori wardens, barmen and constables. He also dangles a wealth of suspects before the reader: a childhood friend who’s envious of Ryan, a voyeuristic shearing gang leader, a control-freak realtor, a Bible quoting zealot, an enigmatic school teacher, a local character named Slurps and many more - perhaps too many.

That said, Parkes’ skill in building tension, and the vividness of his writing, more than make up for the occasional narrative overload. A writer to watch.  Reviewed by Greg Fleming